two primary's

[Niall O'Reilly]

On 5 Mar 2008, at 09:17, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>  Chris Dorsman <c.dorsman at bellid.com> wrote
>  a message of 12 lines which said:
>
>> Is it possible to have two primary DNS servers within an network?
>
> Yes, that's why BIND no longer calls them "primary" :-)
>
> You can have two masters, just be sure you synchronize them (rsync or
> another method), BIND will no longer do it for you.

	The OP's question is ambiguous, and Stéphane's answer, although
	correct, may be addressing the wrong aspect of the question.

	It's not safe to assume that the OP has separated authoritative
	and resolving domain name services.  S/he (à propos ambiguity,
	'Chris' is one of those names!) _should_ separate them, of course.

	The terms 'primary' and 'secondary' (or better, 'fallback', since
	there may even be more than two) are still useful when describing
	the set of resolver servers which provide name resolution for each
	client (running only a stub resolver) _within a network_.  IMHO,
	this is the only sensible use of these terms.  The answer in this
	case is 'NO', unless local anycast or a clever stub resolver is in
	use: only one can be first in the list (/etc/resolv.conf or whatever).


	Best regards,

	Niall O'Reilly
	University College Dublin IT Services

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