failing lookups

[Bob Puff@NLE]

Hello,

I've recently noticed an oddity with my Bind 8.2.3.  I had two notable occurances in the past two days where lookups to other sites failed on one of my DNS servers, but seemed to work on another.

Further investigation revealed that one of the two nameservers for this given domain appeared to be down.  Bind apparently was trying to query this particular nameserver, and timed out.

Is there a way to play with the config to perhaps modify the timeout value, and have it try the alternative nameserver(s)?

Another somewhat similar problem was found: lookup foo.com.  Ok, returned the IP address.  One of foo.com's nameservers goes down - the one that Bind just got its info from.  Next lookup: test.foo.com.  Bind goes to the nameserver it just got foo.com from, but it's down, so it fails.  It never seems to try the other nameserver(s) for foo.com.

Would upgrading to Bind 9 fix these problems?

BOb