Can another name server find our name server if its IP address has changed?

Re: Can another name server find our name server if its IP address has changed?

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Ralph,

>I need some DNS guru advice sort of, uh, quickly.

I'm sorry that I couldn't respond sooner.

>Our name server's existing IP address is about to become unavailable, in
>just a day or two. We are forced to move the name server to a completely
>new, unrelated IP address.
>
>Our name server is authoritative for about 30 zones. Most of the zones
>are small, usually just www.something.com and mail.something.com.
>Each zone, of
>course, designates our name server in its WHOIS information. WHOIS, as we
>all know, has both the name of our server and its IP address.
>
>Unfortunately, we might not have time to get all those WHOIS
>entries updated to our name server's new IP address before the old
>address goes away.
>
>Suppose another name server is trying to look up an address in one of
>the zones we host. It gets referred to our name server's OLD address.
>But our name server isn't there any more... it is no longer at the
>address specified in the root servers.
>
>My question is this:
>
>Will the other name server, not finding our name server at the numeric
>address specified, then try to find our name server by its NAME?

Probably not, but I'm not actually 100% sure.

> It
>would still be able to find our name server's name in our unaltered,
>off-site secondary DNS. If it searches the secondary by name, it will
>find our name server's NEW address and then the query might be able to
>succeed.
>
>Is BIND (etc.) set up to do that?

I wouldn't want to count on it. Better to have your off-site
secondary server be authoritative for all your zones (and listed in
the delegation records for all your zones). This way, if your primary
server doesn't respond, the resolver goes to the off-site secondary
and gets the final answer it needs.
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