Subject: Secondary nameservers

From: [email-masked] (by way of Ralph Droms <[email-masked]>)
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 07:12:23 -0400 (EDT)

message sent to [email-masked] by [email-masked] follows.
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<speaks a lurker, who doesn't follow things closely or read the 
standards, but has a comment>

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but if you haven't, it 
would be nice if the standard would include fields for secondary and 
tertiary nameservers.....our campus provides them, but there doesn't 
appear to be any way to include them in our server.
Of course, this may already be in the standard, and our AIX DHCP 
server implementation doesn't include them.  Wonder if the Windows 
client does, if it would take them if they were served.

We have backup nameservers, but can't dish them out.  When the 
primary nameserver goes down or is unreachable, DHCP clients 
suffer....

Enlighten my ignorance...
// "I build my cars to go, not to stop", Ettore Bugatti
// Stewart Dean Kingston, NY

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From: Mark Stapp <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 08:45:26 -0400 (EDT)

Stewart,

The 'domain name servers' DHCP option is defined to be a list of ips,
sorted in preference order. Windows clients >= win95 will use the list (at
least the first two servers in the list) in order, in the way that you'd
expect. It sounds as if the limitation is in your server's ui: there are a
number of options that are defined to be an array of something, so it would
be a bit surprising if the server itself can't deal with them. I'm not
familiar with that server, so I can't suggest a workaround. If you post
another message, or a follow-up to this message, with a more exact
description of the server - what vendor, revision, etc. - you might locate
someone who knows how to get your server to do what you want it to do.

Mark