Hi Guys,

I had a DNS box as a primary and now decided to put in a secondary. I have gone to make the new one secondary and the files are updated too.

My question is that, does the primary have to be online for the secondary to work?

- How do i make the secondary work without the primary being online all the time?
- Do I need to forward the secondary DNS request to the primary?

Fresh

it would not serve much purpose if one depended on the other, point them both at the ROOT servers (recommended) or any external dns you want to use.

put the dns servers in your clients.

Can you explain further please. I will so much appreciate it
fresh

I guess you already have the one server up.

You must be using some external dns servers to get addresses from.

setup the other one to do the same, they do not need to get anything from each other. Both of them are waiting on a client to ask for an address, at which point they will resolve one if it is not cached they will get it from the servers you specified to use for dns.

All you need to do for the clients is add the additional dns server address so that they will use it if the primary is down.

You could also slave the secondary DNS from the primary. That way if you make changes to the primary the secondary will pick up those changes on the next update (provided that you change the 'serial' counter on the primary). You may also want to set syslog mail alerts on the slave(s) to notify you of halts due to stale records can't contact master), restart events (slave reboots before master records are ready for Xfer - ie: power outage).

The advantage is that you need only to maintain one set of zone files and the changes will propagate to the slaves during the next zone transfer.