At 5/16/01 5:57 PM, Steve Hsieh wrote:
>It has been mentioned on this list that the order of domain nameservers does
>not matter. Is there an authoritative document somewhere that states this as
>fact and explains why? I have a customer who says their ISP insists that the
>nameserver order does matter, and that they want it listed in a particular
>order. I'm looking for a document that would convince them otherwise...
These are perhaps not direct enough to satisfy your customer, but they do
explain that the primary and secondary name servers, from a resolution
perspective, are completely interchangeable:
http://www.acmebw.com/askmrdns/archive.php?question=3
http://www.acmebw.com/askmrdns/archive.php?question=304
...from which you could draw the logical conclusion that it doesn't
matter what order you enter them in.
You can also demonstrate this phenomenon for yourself using a tool like
dig, which looks up the entries in the root servers:
$ dig opensrs.net ns @a.gtld-servers.net
Try it a few times in a row and you'll notice that they are returned in a
different order each time. Again, therefore, it can't matter what order
you use for input, since the order is not used for output.
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
