🚀 go-pugleaf

mfeinberg@NotAtHome.com (Michael Feinberg) wrote in
<Xns916EE6793ADD4aphotographerhomecom@63.240.76.16>: 

>The first 2 DNS servers appear to be timing out on requests. This is
>causing secondary, and then tertiary servers to be queried. In my case,
>once DNS cycled to the third server I was toast as there was no way I
>could have a chance to resolve DNS again as the OS (Windows) doesn't
>reset to the primary DNS server on it's own.

Good catch, but I think you've misdiagnosed the failure state. If the 3rd 
and 4th servers failed to respond, 2k/XP (not NT, which acts like 9x) should 
cycle back to the 1st server. Instead, I think the 3rd and 4th servers are 
likely to be real DNS servers but unconfigured. That would allow them to 
answer negatively to all queries, which would keep your client "stuck" to 
them. (Ie. they answer, therefore they must be authoritative, and there's no 
need to cycle back to #1.)

Try using nslookup with each of the 4 addresses and see what answers each 
gives. Better, use the free Sam Spade for Windows (http://www.samspade.org/) 
to query each server, as it gives more diagnostic information. I'll bet you 
find live servers on the 3rd and 4th address but they always answer in the 
negative.

Here's the 3 servers I get from DHCP:

216.148.227.68 204.127.202.4 12.242.17.50

The first two successfully return a positive answer to a query for 
www.msn.com. The last reports "NXDOMAIN" (ie. non-existent domain).

(I first ran into this problem on my company LAN, when a 2nd server didn't 
have all the domains served by the primary. My Win2k clients would start 
failing to resolve if network congestion caused them to fail over to the 
secondary. This feature is intended to automatically balance load on the 
DNS servers, but it screws you if your servers aren't identically 
configured.)