round-robin and multi MX practicalities

[Barry Margolin]

In article <8989mn$bpm$1 at nyheter.crt.se>,
 <peter at icke-reklam.manet.dot..nu> wrote:
>David Zade <dzade at rcn.com> wrote:
>> Beware, I do not believe roundrobin will work for failing over to a backup
>> server.  It just hands out the addresses in rotating order.  It will still
>> handout the address of the dead server.
>Correct. Any decent application however will detect that this is a dead
>server and try the next address given in the reply.
>(remember that all addresses is returned in the dns reply, only the order that 
>changes with round-robin)

Well, most applications are probably not "decent", by your definition.

>Also correct. However even here you can create a 'A' record that consist
>of several addresses. Again, any decent application will detect dead
>servers and go on with the next.

Do Netscape, IE, and/or Eudora do this?  I haven't checked, but my guess is
that they aren't all decent, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were all
indecent.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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