Secondary nameserver not in record - possibly dumb question about this..

[Roy Arends]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Peter Rose wrote:

> Thanks for that, I sort of thought that's what happened.
> 
> I have actually gone back to Chapeter 9 - but at the risk of sounding
> incredibly thick  -
> 
> If, due to the fact that only bambam.swlink.net is shown as the
> authoritative ns for usscreen.com, have I got this right that if bambam
> is down and dino is queried, it will only tell the querying resolver to
> go and ask bambam?
> Would it not be possible that dino could answer from cache if it's
> records for that domain have not expired - after all, it appears that
> dino does have a zonefile for usscreen.com?
> 
> Sorry to be dense, I am but a seeker after truth:-)

In general, there is no authoritative nameserver for usscreen.com that is
called dino.swlink.net. Even worse, dino self says authoritativly (aa bit
set) that the authority on usscreen.com is bambam.swlink.net. 

In practice what happens is that records from bambam get cached, and
records from dino not. Only authoritative answers gets cached. This means
that dino is causing extra traffic. 

Regards,

Roy Arends
Nominum