Master and slave servers

[Kevin Darcy]

mike at snix wrote:

> I have two DNS servers running on RedHat 6.1.  I have one acting as the
> primary and one as the secondary.  I have the secondary pointing to the
> primary as a slave.  If the primary goes down, will the slave serve the DNS?
> Or do I need to have the files located on the secondary and set ip up as a
> master as well?

The slave will replicate the zone data from the master and serve queries for
the zone "authoritatively", regardless of whether the master is up or not.
Other nameservers will only know to ask the slave about the zone, however, if
the NS records in the zone and in the parent zone are configured correctly --
if there are no NS records referring to the slave, then it's just a
"stealth" slave and doesn't provide any redundancy except for clients
explicitly configured to use it.


- Kevin