From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 4 7:24:21 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E3F6B37B71A for ; Wed, 4 Apr 2001 07:24:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Wed, 4 Apr 2001 15:24:11 +0100 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 14koC0-0004HB-00; Wed, 04 Apr 2001 15:23:28 +0100 Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 15:23:28 +0100 (BST) From: Jan Grant To: Dru Cc: Evren Yurtesen , freebsd-questions Subject: Re: DNS primary secondary question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Dru wrote: > > Hi Evren, > > from "man 5 resolver": > > nameserver Internet address (in dot notation) of a name server that the > resolver should query. Up to MAXNS (currently 3) name > servers may be listed, one per keyword. If there are multi- > ple servers, the resolver library queries them in the order > listed. If no nameserver entries are present, the default is > to use the name server on the local machine. (The algorithm > used is to try a name server, and if the query times out, try > the next, until out of name servers, then repeat trying all > the name servers until a maximum number of retries are made). > > Dru > > > On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Evren Yurtesen wrote: > > > actually I wondered when you set for a domain name primary server as > > x.x.x.x and secondary server as y.y.y.y then the resolver contacts with > > primary server or secondary server or both? I mean the name servers > > listed on the whois output... Nice quote, but it describes the behaviour of the resolver on entries in /etc/resolv.conf, which is not what was being asked, as far as I can tell. The DNS system as a whole cannot tell the difference between a primary and secondary nameserver for a domain. The whole notion is one of expediency of configuration. Whois and domain registration still list two nameservers (primary and secondary) because it attempts redundancy (that's why two): the primary and secondary distinction there was initially kinda intended to reflect that people would run their own nameserver for a domain (the primary) and get somebody else offsite to host the secondary. Your machine will query the nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf in order when it attempts to resolve a DNS query (ie, punting the question to a named somewhere). named itself will pick a NS for a remote domain out of the list of NSs for that domain, for each query: each remote NS will be hit 1/n of the time (roughly), where there are n remote NS for that domain. As clear as mud..? -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk Scrabble gematria: "BIBLE" = "DOGMA" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message