trying different name servers listed in /etc/resolv.conf

[Kevin Darcy]

Amardeep Singh wrote:

>Hi,
>
>If there are multiple nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf, what is 
>the strategy for trying a particular one of them. Is it that on every 
>gethostbyname invocation, first one is always tried, and if it doesn't 
>responds in a particular time frame, second one is tried and so on --- 
>or some history is maintained so that if first one doesn't reply for 
>some no. of queries, automatically second one becomes the default server.
>
They are tried in order, with timeouts. It's kind of hard to keep a 
"history" since resolvers on Unix platforms are typically implemented as 
library routines, in which case each new process that initializes a 
resolver shares nothing in common with any other processes that happen 
to be using resolvers on the same machine...

- Kevin