I have my domain setup to recognize Linode's name servers as authoritative. I am wandering if it would be possible to setup the name servers to forward my domain to another IP if my Linode fails. Unfortunately I can't afford another Linode to act as a failover (if I could afford it, I would), so I am hoping to setup the name servers so that if my Linode fails for some reason (e.g. if something happens to the datacenter), it will forward to the IP of a friend's server until my Linode comes back online.

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Kris the Piki Geeker

You can change DNS via the API using the domain.resource.update method. When you detect that your Linode fails, hit that with the new target IP address and it will pick it up on the next refresh.

Determining when your Linode fails is an exercise for the reader, but a cron job involving curl or wget from your friend's server would probably do nicely.

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Is it good way to implement DNS-failover?

It's a way to implement it, and will work, although there's quite a few ways for it to fail. For "business-class" production stuff, I'd generally use an already-implemented solution like DNS Made Easy.

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