How secondary dns functions...

[Mark Damrose]

"Christopher Corn" <christopher_corn at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a8e223$h45 at pub3.rc.vix.com...
>
> Hoping someone can clarify how secondary DNS server function as a
> failover, or if they even do.

Depends.

A secondary serving your domain, that's properly configured and delegated
from a higher level should get roughly half of the queries at all times, and
should handle all of the queries when the primary is down.

A secondary (as in second server) doing recursive queries on behalf of your
clients, may or may not be used - it depends on your clients.

  I've taken my primary dns server
> offline, yet users cannot make queries to the secondary.  My thought
> is that , if i register both dns servers with the registrar, if the
> first query fails to get a respond, the query to the second was made.
> Am i wrong?

OK, this is the first case then.  Yes, the secondary should be getting all
the traffic.  It is probably misconfigured.  Have you tested the server to
see if it's answering queries?  If you want help doing that, you will need
to tell us the domain name and the server that should be functioning.  Have
you checked the logs?

>
> Thanks in advance
>