On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Carl Houseman <[email protected]> wrote:
> When there are multiple adapters each with their own DNS, DNS
> resolution is attempted on each adapter in turn until one resolves
> it and only fails if none of them resolve it.

  I believe that is inaccurate.

  To the best of my knowledge, an NXDOMAIN response from an
authoritative nameserver *is* considered a successful result for a DNS
query.  The query did not fail.  The local stub resolver *did* receive
an answer.  That answer said, "I contacted a nameserver which is
authoritative for the zone in question, and that nameserver said the
domain name you want does not exist".  A failure would be a SERVFAIL
response from an intermediate full-service resolver, or no response at
all (timeout).

  In every relevant situation I've encountered, observed behavior has
corroborated the above.

  It's the difference between sending an email message and getting a
failure notice stating "The recipient address does not exist on this
server", vs sending an email message and getting a failure notice
stating "The destination email server could not be reached after
several tries; I'm giving up".  The former says authoritatively the
recipient address is bogus; the message could never be delivered
(unless configuration changes).  The later just says your message
could not be delivered, but it might be a temporary problem.

-- Ben

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