We have 3 production Alphas that we are wanting to make available at any time
for running our applications. However, there's one glitch...
One of the Alphas is our primary name server for DNS, and a second Alpha is a
secondary name server loading its info from the primary. One of our real-time
applications runs over a WAN using a name lookup to determine which production
Alpha to access. However, if we were to lose our primary name server Alpha,
then we won't be able to update the information on the secondary.
1) Is there a workaround to update DNS information on a secondary name server
when the primary is down?
2) Alternatively I was wondering about changing the secondary name server to a
second primary name server. However, the "DNS and Bind" book from O'Reilly
(1994 ed.) says on p.78, "You could set up another primary name server, but we
don't recommend it. You can always change a secondary name server into a
primary name server later if you decide that you want to expend the extra work
it takes to run multiple primary name servers." Other than a one-time effort to
automate keeping the data files in sync (via make, csh script or rdist), what
extra work is involved? Are there any disadvantages or drawbacks to running
multiple primary name servers on Alphas?
Kevin McGuire
Lattice Trading
617-832-1809
Received on Wed Dec 20 1995 - 23:08:20 NZDT