proper setup of primary and secondary dns for hosting

mp3nomad

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May 25, 2006, 12:29:02 AM5/25/06

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What is the correct way to setup primary and secondary DNS servers for
hosting public websites? How should the primary and secondary DNS servers be
configured so that if the primary goes down the secondary server will service
DNS requests? I have the primary server setup with the primary zone files and
the secondary with secondary zone files but when the primary DNS server is
totally down, the secondary does not seem to be able to service requests.

What is the proper configuration for setting up primary and secondary DNS
servers for hosting public domains?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Carlo Cacciafesta

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May 25, 2006, 5:05:02 AM5/25/06

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First of all you must check that there are two NS records in the zone
pointing to the two DNS servers. These records identify the DNS servers
responsible for that zone.

Then you should verify that zone transfer works correctly from the primary
DNS server to the secondary one. It's sufficient that you check the zone on
both servers and verify that, creating a new record on the primary server,
this record is copied on the secondary through zone transfer.

Now the zone should be correctly configured and working. Hope it helps.

Regards,

Carlo

mp3nomad

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May 25, 2006, 11:14:02 AM5/25/06

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Thanks Carlo.

I think the problem may be that the zone files are not getting transferred
to the secondary DNS. There are some zone files residing there but not all of
the zones from the primary. Is there a way to force them all to copy over to
the secondary?

Regards,
Shelly

mp3nomad

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May 25, 2006, 11:41:02 AM5/25/06

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I see if I readd the "missing" secondary zone manually... the file copies
over from the primary. I just wondered if there was a way to do this globally
instead of manually. The secondary zones that were added manually are the
files that are available on the secondary DNS. The ones that I had setup
using the dnscmd resource program are the ones that are missing.

Carlo Cacciafesta

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May 25, 2006, 11:45:02 AM5/25/06

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"mp3nomad" wrote:
> Thanks Carlo.
>
> I think the problem may be that the zone files are not getting transferred
> to the secondary DNS. There are some zone files residing there but not all of
> the zones from the primary. Is there a way to force them all to copy over to
> the secondary?
>
> Regards,
> Shelly

On the secondary DNS server, right-clicking the secondary zone there should
be a "Reload from master" command (I don't remember exactly). This would
transfer the whole zone from the primary DNS server. A "Transfer from master"
command would transfer only different records from the primary to the
secondary zone.

mp3nomad

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May 25, 2006, 11:52:02 AM5/25/06

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Thanks Carlo. I just tried to do a "reload from master" and I got an error
message "Zone not loaded by DNS server". "transfer from master" works but the
.dns file does not get created on the secondary DNS server.

mp3nomad

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May 25, 2006, 1:03:02 PM5/25/06

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as long as the secondary zones have been added to secondary DNS, copying the
.dns files over from the primary DNS server seems to work ok to fix this
issue.