I own a domain econemon.com
. Below is an excerpt from the DNS entry (some records omitted for brevity):
econemon.com. 1800 IN NS ns.stratoserver.net.
econemon.com. 1800 IN NS ns2.stratoserver.net.
econemon.com. 1800 IN A 85.214.92.48
These nameservers there are those from my provider, and as far as I understood it, they are the authorative ones for my domain.
Now, when I go ask one of them for the address record of a nonexistent subdomain, it responds with the address for my server, like so:
$ host -t A nosuchdomain.econemon.com ns.stratoserver.net
Using domain server:
Name: ns.stratoserver.net
Address: 81.169.163.40#53
Aliases:
nosuchdomain.econemon.com has address 85.214.92.48
Which is, of course, exactly what I want in order to have virtual hosts etc. Now, say I added an entry
econemon.com. IN NS ns.econemon.com
and the proper A record for ns.econemon.com
to the list, and that nameserver actually had different A records for some subdomains, what would happen?
- would a request for
subdomain.econemon.com
yield a different address depending on which name server you asked? (I guess it would.) - if so, this might actually be useful to fall back to a "main server" if my DNS was down, but how do I make the client to use my name server when it's up?
- would this mess up caching on the clients? (Probably.)