here is what im looking to do and i hope someone can help me ..

i have a primary nameserver to one server and secondary nameserver going to another server ..


what i would like to do is synce up a website on the second server .

so if server #1 goes down . it falls over to the secondary nameserver to server #2 --

i would sync up the site maybe once a week on server #2

what is the best way for me to accomplish this task , i was looking at wget and rsync .. but does rsync has to be installed on both computers ?

im open to comments at this point , i am stuck "HELP"

This isn't so much of a DNS question, as a load balancing/failover question. For the cheap solution, I suppose you could set the TTL on your zone to be a low number (say 3600 or lower), so that if the site went down you could switch the IP address. However if you wanted actual failover capability, you'd have to get a load balancer.

but in theory , if the primary nameserver fails , it then checks the secondary nameserver for a response. and if the second server is up. everything is fine. my goal is to mirror the website on the first server to the second ..

im not looking for a load balancer , im looking for a failsafe website. to limited downtime of the website itself.


this would be based on the DNS setting and nameserver ips correct ?

Well ... somewhat I suppose. But regardless if your secondary nameserver was up, you'd still have to change the DNS to point the website to the IP address of the second server.

ok i see what your saying ,

but i will have a dns record on the second server with a different A address (ip) in the zone file .. the A address will be the ip of the website on the second server and the a address on the primary will be the ip on the first server


i see your point if both dns zones had the same info it would not work that way .

thanks Ben , i believe you answered my question i will give something a try

Whoa, hold on there. Serving a different zone (probably with even a different serial) from your secondary DNS, will cause you a lot of heartache. There are a lot of resolvers out there that will query either the primary OR the secondary nameserver. Plus, if you make changes on the primary, they will not be replicated to the secondary. If you're really worried about this, I'd keep your DNS hosted on some place other than these two servers and keep the TTL low so that you can switch the IP of your webserver record to the secondary pretty quickly in case the primary goes down. Other than that, you're looking at a load balancing solution that has failover.

hmm , crap

so you dont think my idea would work ?

i saw SM offering Load balancing but it seem kinda high for some dns entries errrrr 49.00

any other recommendations ?