Earlier there was some dispute about what the RFCs say about multiple nameservers.
I found the following RFC which does have something to say about these issues. http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/rfc/rfc2182.txt Here are a couple of passages... Request for Comments: 2182 Category: Best Current Practice Selection and Operation of Secondary DNS Servers Abstract The Domain Name System requires that multiple servers exist for every delegated domain (zone). This document discusses the selection of secondary servers for DNS zones. Both the physical and topological location of each server are material considerations when selecting secondary servers. The number of servers appropriate for a zone is also discussed, and some general secondary server maintenance issues considered. [...] With multiple servers, usually one server will be the primary server, and others will be secondary servers. Note that while some unusual configurations use multiple primary servers, that can result in data inconsistencies, and is not advisable. The distinction between primary and secondary servers is relevant only to the servers for the zone concerned, to the rest of the DNS there are simply multiple servers. All are treated equally at first instance, even by the parent server that delegates the zone. Resolvers often measure the performance of the various servers, choose the "best", for some definition of best, and prefer that one for most queries. That is automatic, and not considered here. [...] -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to network-manager in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1003842 Title: dnsmasq sometimes fails to resolve private names in networks with non- equivalent nameservers Status in “dnsmasq” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in “network-manager” package in Ubuntu: In Progress Status in “dnsmasq” source package in Precise: Confirmed Status in “network-manager” source package in Precise: Triaged Status in “dnsmasq” package in Debian: New Bug description: A number of reports already filed against network-manager seem to reflect this problem, but to make things very clear I am opening a new report. Where appropriate I will mark other reports as duplicates of this one. Consider a pre-Precise system with the following /etc/resolv.conf: nameserver 192.168.0.1 nameserver 8.8.8.8 The first address is the address of a nameserver on the LAN that can resolve both private and public domain names. The second address is the address of a nameserver on the Internet that can resolve only public names. This setup works fine because the GNU resolver always tries the first- listed address first. Now the administrator upgrades to Precise and instead of writing the above to resolv.conf, NetworkManager writes server=192.168.0.1 server=8.8.8.8 to /var/run/nm-dns-dnsmasq.conf and "nameserver 127.0.0.1" to resolv.conf. Resolution of private domain names is now broken because dnsmasq treats the two upstream nameservers as equals and uses the faster one, which could be 8.8.8.8. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dnsmasq/+bug/1003842/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp