O.k. I am looking for a cost effective way to add reduncancy/failover.

I have two servers - server1 is primary DNS with website1 and server2 is secondary DNS with a mirrored/rsync'd copy of website1.

Can't I just setup the DNS records on Server1 to point to website1 on server1? Then setup server2 DNS records to point to IP on server2?

My thoughts are that if Server1 fails, the site goes down...the DNS goes down and then the secondary DNS at server2 will kick in and point to server2's mirrored/rsync'd copy of website1. Then when server1 comes back it because the primary and everything is hunky.

My brain says this should work "In Theory", but I fully admit I am NO DNS expert.

Can anyone add anything to this???

Thanks!

Well it should work, but there are some difficulties with it. If just the http server is down and dns still works on that box, then the user will get an error.

It sounds good, but I believe I heard someone say that sites don't always pick up the first dns(if available).

Want to see what people have to say (subscribing to thread).

Never tried it...but sounds good, yeah....

This varies a bit. Some DNS servers will query both primary and secondary and take the "fastest" response. IF your second server is an exact duplicate, this may not be a problem however.

Generally, people will put two A records on both servers (round robin), then del one if it goes down.