Super-Networking Blog

So we have a couple of down and dirty backup servers that run backup scripts and a free backup program called SyncBack. These methods of backups are cheap (free), easy and fast. One problem you run into is when replicating data to multiple locations that have different retention times you need a way to clean-up old files.

We are talking about over 1TB of backed up data and some individual files that are over 100GBs in size. What we have done in the past is use batch files to run clean-up jobs. Robocopy is used to move aged files from backup locations to another location and then the del command is used to empty the directory. The problem with this method is it takes quite some time to move the files and takes additional space as a queue before deletion. The del command doesn’t have age switches built in.

I found a freeware product called delage32 that adds the age functionality into the mix. Now instead of my cleanup scripts moving the old files to a new directory and then del everything in that clean-up directory it just deletes files with a certain age out of the backup directories. This is much more efficient.

Download it here

Well I just got through switching some 700+ domains from VegaDNS to our new Simple DNS Plus platform. Vega DNS ran on Linux and in a 99% Windows environment keeping Linux around just to run DNS was not viable. Simple DNS Plus running on Windows 2003 and is a simple, easy to manage, but powerful DNS solution.

VegaDNS was a complicated DNS program. Most people who run DNS on Linux run on some version of BIND. VegaDNS did run on BIND but did not take the simple approach of BIND. Basically how Vega worked was you take BIND, run TinyDNS on top of it, then run VegaDNS on top of TinyDNS. VegaDNS adds a web front-end and a MySQL back-end onto the BIND framework. You could keep all of the DNS servers insync off of that one MySQL database. It then kept local BIND files on the DNS server for serving up DNS. To maintain, backup and troubleshoot VegaDNS was complicated and annoying, to make things worst we had two installs of VegaDNS on all of our DNS servers with two different databases. If any one piece broke the whole thing became a mess.

Now everything is running on one program. Simple DNS Plus has master and slave servers and keeps all DNS servers synced. It keeps all of the data in one folder on all DNS servers, you backup that folder and you can have your entire DNS infrastructure rebuild in a matter of minutes. It can be managed with a Web front-end or a fat client, both are built-in. Import tools make migrations from other platforms easy. It has real-time DNS hit and cache stats as well as detailed logs if you want. It has built-in DOS mitigation and attack mitigation technics like telnet disconnect, version masking etc…

So far performance has been great and I would recommend to anyone looking for a solid Windows based DNS platform. Did I also mention that it is inexpensive. Check it out!