Do both servers have to be up to resolve?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <RP%M4.79421$dc2.1026690 at news0.telusplanet.net>,
David Cost <dcost at post.com> wrote:
>Question is: because the zone for the domain that no longer works no longer
>exists on the secondary nameserver, would that account for the Domain
>returning a DNS error when you try to find it with a browser even though the
>primary nameserver is working and configured correctly? In other words do
>zones physically have to exist on both nameservers in order to get it to
>resolve via one of them without an error?

Yes.

Client machines sending queries don't know which is primary or secondary,
they just pick one of the servers and send the queries to it, and return
the response that they got.  If RealDNS's response is that the domain
doesn't exist, that's what will be returned to the application if the local
server happens to select that one.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.