Round Robin A Records

[janl at linpro.no]

"Steve Ford" <sford at ncc.dhl.com> tastet:
> www    0300    IN A    198.141.222.111
>             0300    IN A    198.141.223.117

I'm fairly sure that 0300 is octal to bind, and equivalent to 192 seconds,
not 300 seconds.

> When a client attempts to resolve the address of the hostname 'www' is
> it true that the client will receive one of the IP addresses on a round
> robin basis?
> 
> If we lose one of the servers, say it is booted down, every second
> request will be the IP address of the unavailable server.
> 
> Does anyone know a way of configuring DNS so that if one server is down
> all requests are directed to the available server dynamically?

No, not with BIND.
Or, yes: See www.eddieware.org.

> Manually we remove the A record for the unavailable server.

You _could_ change it to a dynamic zone and then write software polling
each of the web servers and removing any A records pointing to non
functional servers.

Nicolai