achieving failover with 2 primary name servers?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <bn0256$ut3$1 at sf1.isc.org>, Ori Tend  <ori_tend at yahoo.com> wrote:
>Hi All,
> 
>Trying to achieve a simple failover, I think of the following:
>Have 2 dns servers for my domain at the registrar.
>Both would act as a primary server for the domain.
>DNS1 will answer requests, and delegate www.domain.com to first ip -
>which is hosted on the same box as DNS1.
>DNS2 will answer requests, and delegate www.domain.com to second ip -
>which is hosted on the same box as DNS2.
> 
>The rational is that if a resolver can't reach any of the DNS servers
>(either DNS1 or DNS2), it's most likely won't be able to reach the ip's
>that are hosted on box1 and box2 respectively as well, due to a box
>failure.
>So I assume that in case of a failover scenario, box1 will not be
>reached- therefor, the client resolver will try DNS2, which will reply
>with the ip of the apache placed on box2- and that's how a failover will
>be achieved.
> 
>The only drawback I can think of is that a zones would have to be
>transfered manualy, when a zone is changed, but sine i change the zones
>rarely, it's not that much of a hassle.
>Can anyone point other issues? Will it even work?

I think this should work fine.

You should make the TTL of the www.domain.com record short, so that
resolvers don't cache the address of the failing box for long.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin at level3.com
Level(3), Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.