Secondary dns questions

[wheel]

In what order does a secondary dns get used? Is it round robin, random, only on failover from the primary?

I set up my secondary on my home connection simply because I wanted it physically remote from my primary dns. But it's hogging my home connection,so I want to do something different. What are your thoughts on:
- somehow forcing the primary to do all the queries unless it's a failover. This would be fine with me, lots of horsepower on the primary.
- I could double the speed on my home connection. That's not perfect either, has some limitations.
- I could throw my secondar on a second IP on my primary (i.e. same server). bad practice, but if my main server is down, I probably don't care about secondary dns being up.
- I could find some secondary dns hosting, but I'm struggling with finding a good place to do this - particularly if the secondary is used as often as the primary; I need rock solid if that's the case, need fast dns responses.

How do you handle your secondary dns?

[dstiles]

I wouldn't have expected a "hog" for DNS. Have you hardened it against attack? I forget the details now but a Bing should get them... :)

Apart from that it's been a while since I ran a local DNS server here and that was on Windows.

I used to use a USA service for primary and secondary DNS ... it's been so long I had to look it up: ZoneEdit.

[wheel]

DNS shouldn't be a hog, but I'm at .5mbits up and about 4 down, so between surfing and voip it should be fine - but I've got a domain that does a couple million dns queries every month. I think it's that one domain.

In any event, I think I found a reasonable solution. Most of my domains don't do enough traffic to worry about, and I was finding it difficult to find a dns service in my country that would allow me to host all the dozens/hundreds of domains I have (or at least host the dns for them). I eventually found a company that does do it, and just moved over my one domain that's problematic. That'll take 95% of the load off my home connection, and that should fix it I think.

It's not pretty, but it works :).

[bakedjake]

I use DynDNS for everything and love them. Their price goes down as you add more domains... for $20/year or so per domain it's reasonable enough.

[wheel]

Thanks bakedjake.

One thing I did that helped was to install a tool called dnstop on my nameserver. Then I ran "dnstop eth0 -l 3". That works kind of like 'top' on linux, but shows you what domains are being queried. Interestingly, another domain I thought wasn't taking much traffic looks to also be getting some queries, so I may offload that domain as well.

[Hoople]

ZoneEdit is one service I have used for DNS services.

[tizs]

wheel: it's really not a good idea to replicate a DNS on a home connection. It's not much about bandwidth, as much as it is about latency: home links are usually terrible at that.
You have no way to make clients contact the primary only with DNS.

Just get one of the many secondary DNS services around. XName allows you to run both primary and secondary (full DNS hosting). BuddyNS [buddyns.com] does only secondary but guarantees very tight sinchronization time. Both are for free.