Answer: This answer assumes that your boot scripts are already running svscan in a /service directory. pickdns relies on svscan to start it and to restart it at boot time.
You will have to make three decisions:
pickdns-conf pickdns dnslog /etc/pickdns 1.2.3.20Tell svscan about the new service:
ln -s /etc/pickdns /servicesvscan will start the service within five seconds.
Now change directory to /service/pickdns/root, and create a new data file listing the web-server IP addresses in pickdns-data format:
+www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.150 +www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.151 +www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.152 +www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.153 # and so onRun
maketo tell pickdns about the data.
On the heaven.af.mil DNS server, delegate www.heaven.af.mil to 1.2.3.20:
cd /service/tinydns/root ./add-childns www.heaven.af.mil 1.2.3.20 make
Answer: Change directory to /service/pickdns/root, and add location lines to data in pickdns-data format:
%LU:1.2 %LU:1.5 +www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.220:LU +www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.221:LU +www.heaven.af.mil:1.2.3.222:LUThe location code LU must be 1 or 2 bytes long.
Run
maketo tell pickdns about the data.
Answer: IANA has a summary of IP address locations, which I've converted into a Network Continent Guide in pickdns-data format.
Answer: pickdns is designed to work with external programs that monitor the health of your servers. An external program can remove an IP address from the list by simply changing + to - on each line with that IP address, then running make.
Note that standard client behavior is to try each of the three addresses provided by pickdns, so a server outage will merely produce delays, not failures. To minimize the delay, smart clients will try each address with a two-second timeout before retrying each address with a long timeout.