"/etc/resolv.conf" revisited

[Barry Margolin]

In article <200E2FA22B2AD2119AC000104B6A0A860203CBC3 at PSBMAIL1>,
Bhangui_S  <Bhangui_S at bls.gov> wrote:
>Thanks Barry for the response.
>
>One more question  Let us say that the order in my "/etc/resov.conf" is as
>follows
>
>nameserver	M/C A (Secondary for xyz.com)
>
>nameserver	M/C B	 (Primary for xyz.com)
>
>I know I should have the primary first. 

Not necessarily.

>					 I am just trying to understand the
>roll-over feature properly in a test environment.  But does BIND care about
>which is primary or secondary while I try to resolve a name. Or does this
>file just tells BIND the order in which to look. Because under the above
>configuration I get the following results.

Only the DNS administrator cares which is primary or secondary.  Clients
don't.

>1. Try to resolve a name by trying to ping by name am able to resolve
>properly. (So I guess is is picking the information from M/C A and
>responding as it is the first server in the order now being secondary here
>for xyz.com does it matter here?)
>
>2. Now I kill the named on M/C A. And I try to ping a machine on the network
>by name it gives me more than 5 Seconds timeout and does not come back with
>a response immediately as I would have thought it would move to M/C B and
>resolve it promptly. Now is this caused becasue M/C A was secondary and M/C
>B was primary.?

It should ask B after a 5-second timeout.

Maybe the problem is that B hasn't successfully transferred the zone.  So
when the query goes to B, it can't find the answer in its memory, so it
tries to ask A.  But since A is down, this doesn't work.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
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