[thelist] DNS, specifically TTL

[Michael Buffington]

Will I cause volcanoes to erupt or hurricanes to form over the Caribbean if
I set TTL (time to live) to be 10 seconds rather the default 10800?

I just discovered something, that while it might be ancient history to some,
is incredibly cool and brand new to me.

I've wanted to host silly stuff from my house over a cable modem for some
time, but we all know that the cable broadband providers don't usually
provide static IP addresses (let alone allow hosting in the first place, but
that's a TOS technicallity that I can shamelessly ignore). 

Because the IP is issued by a DHCP server, hosting something is almost not
worth the complexities, or it was until I found out about free DNS hosting
and dynamic IP dns updaters.

What I'm doing now to host over my cable modem is:

I have all my domains pointing to www.centralinfo.net (providers of free DNS
hosting).  I wrote a CFML custom tag that checks to see if my server's IP
has changed, and if it has, it immediately goes out and updates my DNS
information at centralinfo.  Pretty cool! If anyone is interested in using
the custom tag, let me know. With some cleanup I'll post it to the dev ex
eventually.

So, now that you know the background to my question - here's another - is
setting the TTL to 10 seconds the best way of reducing any transition time
between IP switches? Can I set it to 0 to essentially have 0 timeouts when
my IP shifts?  Any thoughts?

Michael Buffington
mike at price.com
(714) 556-3890 x222
http://www.price.com