Answer: Note that, in versions 1.04 and above, you do not need to use pickdns. The features of pickdns have been incorporated into tinydns.
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.