Hi,

I'm pretty new to server administration and I think I might be in over my
head.

Here's what I have set up:
I have a co-located unix server on the east coast and two local nt servers
here on the west coast. I have full administration and root access on the
co-located server and on the local servers (I'm in the same room with the
local servers). All servers are set up as primary dns. InterNic has
mydomain.com in their database with all three dns servers.

Here's what I want to do:
If the server on the east coast goes down, I want mydomain.com to
automatically go to one of the local servers so that there is no
interruption in service to my clients. And if dns#1 and dns#2 happen to be
down, mydomain.com will be served by dns#3. Then, when dns#1 comes back
online, mydomain.com will automatically revert to being served by dns#1.

Here's what's actually been happening:
I shut down dns#1, and tried to get to http://mydomain.com. I kept getting
"server is unreachable" and 404 errors for about 24 hours. Then, it finally
went over to dns#2. So, after a few accesses to http://mydomain.com to make
sure it was really accessing dns#2 and not a cache somewhere, I shut down
both dns#2 and dns#3 to make it go back to dns#1, which I had rebooted. It
took another 24 hours for it to go back to dns#1! Obviously, the ISPs are
caching the IP addresses, rather than searching my dns.

I thought I had a good plan to ensure reliability for my clients, but it's
not working. What's going on? What have I done wrong?

I appreciate any and all help!

Christine





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