The normal procedure on internet-connected systems is to set the resolv.conf file to include at least 2 domain name servers. Example:
nameserver 139.78.100.1 nameserver 139.78.200.1 Last night, I had to take down our primary DNS for maintenance and lots of FreeBSD and Linux systems began having trouble of various kinds. While I expected the FreeBSD system I was on to hang for a couple of seconds and then start using the second DNS, it basically froze while some Linux boxes also began exhibiting similar behavior. I finally manually changed the resolv.conf on the system I was using to force the slave DNS to be first in the list and that helped, but loosing the primary DNS was not the slight slowdown one might expect. It was a full-blown outage. Are we missing some other configuration directive for Unix systems that would make the systems use the redundancy a little more gracefully than what happened? Otherwise, why have it if somebody has to manually intervene? The only thing we should have lost was dynamic updates. The outage lasted for 25 minutes or so but didn't resolve until the primary came back on line. This is my week for asking novice questions, but I don't get to see what happens when the master goes away all that often and what I saw wasn't pretty. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group _______________________________________________ bind-users mailing list bind-users@lists.isc.org https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users