Minimizing Downtime When Switching IP Addresses?

GeekTek asks: "As we all know, prices for co-location have plummeted since the height of the dot.com era. We've been shopping around and found a solution that works for us. We have a small setup of about a dozen Debian boxen, a few Windows servers and we run our own name servers (BIND 8.x). Most of our domain names are managed through our OpenSRS account. My concern is switching all of our server's IP addresses. I can not have any down time and I want to minimize the number of trips to the current co-lo (it's >2 hours away). What is the best way to do it? What experiences can you share in similar situations?"

Comments

Re:what services are you running?

[Papineau]

At Expos games, does the guy come down the aisle shout "chien chauds!! chien chauds!!!"?

No, and the reason is simple: not enough people to warrant for such a service. You want something, you go to the stand. Maybe in the front rows there's still doing this, but last time I went it was a guy taking orders through some kind of wireless PDA to the stands, and what you ordered was then brought to you directly...

Oh, you were talking about the language used? It's easier to only say "Chips, peanuts, cracker jacks, hot dogs, pretzel", as they are the same in French and in English, than to say it in one language and repeat it after in the other one.

Re:Another part of the job....

[dpilot]

He wants to change IP numbers on a bunch of servers. You can serve static IP out of a DHCP server using MACIP mapping. That way you can accomplish a subnet-wide IP change from a single administration point. It confines the problem of changing IP numbers to DHCP/DNS servers. Others touched on the DNS side, I felt that the DHCP side had something to offer in simplifying his job.