How To: Set up BIND to round robin?

[Kevin Darcy]

xjeffx wrote:

> I work for a small ISP and we are trying to set up a mirrored web
> server (i.e. when the primary web server goes down, BIND goes to the
> secondary web server).
>
> Just want to know how you set up the records so that BIND knows to go
> to a secondary server.
>
> I'm not really looking for load-balancing, so much as I'm looking for
> a backup solution to a server going down.  Thanx.

BIND doesn't "go to" web servers. BIND is nameserver software -- mostly
it just translates names to addresses, which it gives out to web
browsers and then *they* "go to" the web servers.

The basic way to provide redundancy using DNS is to define multiple
address records for the website name. This will provide some crude
load-balancing under normal circumstances, and if one node fails, most
modern web browsers will fail over to other addresses in the list. (For
an extended outage, of course, you should remove the dead server from
the list, because even in the best case there is a slight timeout delay
before the client failover occurs).


- Kevin