Secondary DNS issue

[Volks]

Right now i have only one DNS server with all of my websites on it. I have a 2nd machine that i have transfered all of my website files to. I set up DNS on the 2nd machine as a secondary DNS zone and have set my primary to forward zones to the 2nd. On the 2nd server i cannot view the websites when i disable the primary one.

Mainly what i'm trying to do is have an exact replica of my live server so if it goes down, none of my clients notice. I expect this to alot of back and forth messaging, but i've been working on this for a while now and i'm frustrated. So any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Law]

What OS are you using?

 

[Volks]

sorry its server 2000

 

[Law]

Secondary DNS server is just a backup of your Primary server, so if the Primary server goes down the client will try to contact the alternate DNS server. For example, if your primary server is the preferred server for the client and the secondary sever is the alternate. When the primary goes down the client will request the alternate server which is the secondary. While the client is requesting from the secondary and the primary is down, if the secondary does not have the information it will forward it to the primary, but the primary is down so the information comes back with no response. And you can't edit the zone file either on a secondary server since it's read only, all editing must be done on the primary.

 

[Law]

I don't know if you can actually configured the secondary DNS to forward query to your ISP DNS server.

A good solution to this is to use AD-intergrated server, with two AD-i server they both replicate DNS information, so if one goes down the other can still function fully and provide forwarding for name that it doesn't know by contacting outside DNS server like your ISP.

 

[Law]

Forgot to mention, what I'm basicly saying about Primary and Secondary is that when the Primary does down the secondary only rely on the information that it got before the primary went down. So if the client contact the secondary and the information is not there then you won't get any response. You can set up two primary DNS server but each must be in a different zone.

The secondary server is just a backup and doesn't do anything but store the zone that it got from the Primary.