Secondary DNS question.

Need help? Ask here.

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
mwdmeyer
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:00 pm
Location: Sydney, Australia
Contact:

Secondary DNS question.

Post by mwdmeyer »

I've just started using the secondary DNS. I setup everything and all was working.

By accident I turned off zone transfers on my primary DNS server and the two (ns1.rollernet.us and ns2.rollernet.us) secondary DNS servers stopped answering for my domain.

Now isn't the point of the secondary DNS servers for when your primary one stops working for some reason? I'm unsure why they stopped working when zone transfers were turned off, the zone was successfully transferred prior to this problem.

I understand if zone transfers are off then updates to the DNS will not work, but shouldn't they continue to serve with the stored records?

Thanks. Great service by the way. :)
birla
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:55 pm

Post by birla »

Relative newbie here, but what is value of the expiry time in your SOA record? Once that elapses, the secondary DNS is supposed to stop answering queries for the domain.
mwdmeyer
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:00 pm
Location: Sydney, Australia
Contact:

Post by mwdmeyer »

Thanks for that although my SOA EXPIRE time is 2 weeks. So it shouldn't have stopped working. I'll need to look at it more.
RollerNetSupport
Site Admin
Posts: 598
Joined: Wed Nov 17, 2004 10:05 pm
Location: Nevada
Contact:

Post by RollerNetSupport »

As long as a secondary has a DNS record, it will continue to answer for that domain. If it can't contact the master, however, it just won't be able to get updates for the zone. (This assumes it was able to get a zone update in the first place.) So it should have continued to work, I'm not sure why it didn't. I'll have to look into that.

The expiration times control how long a record is held in a DNS server's cache before the cache will try to query the authoritative nameservers for new information.
Technical Support support@rollernet.us
Roller Network LLC
Post Reply