Round Robin DNS ?

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2000 at 03:40:29PM -0800, P. Guethlein wrote:
> I know that you can add a backup mail server by using mail2.yourdomain.com 
> .  Will this also work for a web server www2.yourdomain.com ?
> 
> Thanks, -Pete

It is not correct that naming a server "mail2" makes it a secondary
name server.  However, if I have more than one system - e.g., porthos,
athos, and aramis - I can declare them all to be mail servers by adding
MX records pointing to them all, with precedence numbers:

mydomain.local.		IN  MX		10 athos
mydomain.local.		IN  MX		20 porthos
mydomain.local.		IN  MX		30 aramis

This is probably what you have seen with your "mail2".

Of course, nothing in this makes any of these hosts a mail server.  To
do that, you must (a) be running some mail transfer agent (e.g.
'sendmail' or 'postfix') on them, and (b) have them configured so that
each one could receive ALL e-mail and properly pass it on to the same
place, typically the user's local mailbox or POP/IMAP mailbox.

There is nothing in current DNS that declares anything to be a Web
server.  This "www" thing is just a convention.  And a guy named Dave
Yost[1] hates it - he wants them all renamed "web.whatever".  [Very
often "www" is just an alias anyway, so you could have both and make
Dave both mildly happy and annoyed.  ;-)]

I currently have Web servers running on hosts named washington, carter,
web2, bush, cosposun2, anubis, kennedy, and others.  The name is mostly
irrelevant [but not completely, in the case of name-based virtual
hosts].  What makes them Web servers?  Only the fact that i am running
a Web server on some port of each of them.

Hope this helps.

[1] <URL: http://web.yost.com/misc/nix-on-www.html>

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
COSPO/OSIS Computer Support					EMT-B
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