Search Again: Re: General DNS, primary, secondary etc From: Men & Mice Support Date: Tuesday, November 2, 2004 Time: 9:45:10 am At 12:48 AM -0800 11/2/04, Scott Haneda wrote: >I have queries on in QDNS, I am running this on my logs: >tail -f /var/named/quickdns.log | grep -v 64.84.37 > >This is a backwards grep, so it shows all hits not in my subnet. Is it >correct that only queries should show up for domains that I am doing DNS >for? Assuming nobody else is trying to use your server for recursion, yes. >More or less, I see a ton of stuff in there, mostly all the slave zones. I >have heard varying explanations of how DNS works in regards to this, I think >that if you have 3 DNS servers, you really have no way of knowing which one >will be asked for the record back. I was under the impression it was >relatively random, which sort of makes sense, but at the same time makes me >wonder why we call them Primaries when really they are more balanced across >however many DNS machines you decide to have. That's why we no longer call the first server the "primary" server. Now it's called the "primary master" server, and the others are slaves. These terms only indicate how each server gets its copy of the zone. - Primary Master = gets the zone locally, directly from the administrator. - Slave = gets the zone from a master server, such as the primary master. (A server can be both slave and master - master just indicates that it is responsible for giving the zone to some (other) slave.) It's common to have just one primary master, no matter how many servers host the zone. >If the above is not true, and I see more or less a steady stream of lookups >coming for the handful of zones I am slaving, does that mean that something >is wrong at the primary, that is for some reason or another can not be >reached and I am taking the slack? No, you can't infer that from seeing incoming queries for these zones. >I don't mind being a secondary, but if it means I am taking the brunt of the >work, it just does not make sense to me. There's no way to tell if you're taking the brunt of the work unless you have access to the logs of the master server as well and can compare traffic levels. Chris Buxton Men & Mice - Making DNS Easy Customer Service and Sales Engineer

Messages In This Thread: General DNS, primary, secondary etc by Scott Haneda on Nov 2, 2004 at 12:49:13 am Re: General DNS, primary, secondary etc by Men & Mice Support on Nov 2, 2004 at 9:45:10 am