Amahi Forums

About 8 months ago I asked how I could enable a secondary DNS, rather than having both DHCP issued DNS addresses pointing to the HDA, but there was no reply as to how this could be done. I have since seen replies where there apparently was a secondary DNS setting but it was removed due to problems - this secondary DNS exists for a reason - as I will explain.

Today my entire network has failed because the HDA computer failing - it is completely dead. I am not geographically near and so I cant fix it. However the wife is and for the wife the internet is like TV, and it no longer works as the DNS is routed via the dead HDA. If there was a secondary DNS I believe this would not have been a problem as it would have worked via the gateway router.

Ultimately the HDA is a weak link in my network - I know the router is also a weak link, but I would prefer one weak link and not to have two of them!

I know DHCP is also a problem, but machines that remain on will not lose their allocated IP addresses as I have given them long lease times. I have read that 2 DHCP servers could be configured to resolve this - but without the secondary DNS issue it is pretty much pointless.

I really think the secondary DNS option needs to be restored, otherwise I will have to disable DHCP and DNS on the HDA for reliability issues.

Finally seen the wreakage and the PSU failed following a FAN failure in the PSU.

After some investigation I think I understand the issues with having a secondary DNS.

The secondary DNS server is not treated as a fall back but an equal to the primary. Thus the only way that a secondary DNS will work correctly for the HDA is if the DNS entries in the HDA are automatically replicated to the secondary DNS from the HDA.

Anyone know how this could be done? Maybe to a remote server somehow?

Actually, near as I could tell (and not being an expert), it seems like windows 7 is the one that started treating the primary/secondary pair not as such but as a load balancer!

Kind of breaks the idea!

We're on all the same boat on this ... it definitely would be great to get some sort of fallback.

Maybe point to your router only and let the router do dns forwarding, point to the HDA in it's primary and your ISP as secondary?

I now dd-wrt and open-wrt have things like DHCP chaining and other fancy options ...

The networking industry needs to make things simple!
(Heh, and we want to lead that way )