I know I can put several name servers in resolv.conf.

Thing is, I'm toying around with OpenNIC at the moment, so I have 3 of theirs in the list right now.

I'd like to also be able to use OpenDNS ones, because to some extent the filtering is nice for other people who connect to my router.

That said, the router is setup to use OpenDNS,and I simply have my own box setup to use OpenNIC.

Now, is there a way for me to set my box up to use OpenDNS, and if the query fails (eg: .inc .glue), have it automatically fall over to OpenNIC ones?

it sounds like you actually want a local bind server to handle forwarding queries. resolv.conf just takes them in order, preferring a local host address if available.

Any howto's on the subject?

Provided that by 'several' you mean 'two, or fewer', that is completely correct (IIRC). Well, to be technically correct, you can put as many in as you want, it just won't use the ones after the second. Not that you'd necessarily want to do that, given the performance penalty...

(Pardon me, but) Weird: you want to configure filtering to block certain sites - that I can understand. And then you want to configure it so that that the filtering sometimes doesn't work. That, I don't understand, but that's OK, too.

Well, if you put the OpenDNS one first and then the OpenNIC one, it will try one first and then, if the first server does not give a reply, it will try the other one. But, it will do this for every query, so it will always be slow for every query that does fall over to the second server, having had to wait for the timeout. It is only a stub resolver, after all.

(Err, and obviously, if it did use a third, that would be very slow.)

There probably are, but would you mind saying on which subject you wanted this how-to:

• the use of a stub resolver
• overview of the advantages and disadvantages of different name caching programs
• how to install and/or configure some particular name server

Sorry, ignore my comments, BIND doesn't have any way to prefer the order of nameservers. All goes to really suggest something's wonky in the logic of what you want to achieve.

dnsmasq can be configured to use multiple DNS servers. Log inspection suggests it selects the fastest one at startup and dynamically adjusts once running.

dnsmasq is relatively easy to configure, too, except for some trickery to stop it querying upstream servers for the local domain defined in the hosts file, details here.

I believe I'm just going to give up on this, it's a lot more technical than I was hoping and not worth the effort.

Point in having OpenDNS was I have the "filter time-wasters" or whatever it is (max filtering, blocks myspace/youtube/porn and such) set up so when friends/family come over and connect to my wireless, they don't waste all my bandwidth. I figured it'd be nice to have that option on my own box, simply because OpenDNS takes out a few odd pages here or there that come up once in a while.