6.2.2. Types of Name Servers
Name servers that hold all information on hosts within a zone are called authoritative for this zone, and sometimes are referred to as master name servers . Any query for a host within this zone will end up at one of these master name servers.
Master servers must be fairly well synchronized. Thus, the zone's network administrator must make one the primary server, which loads its zone information from data files, and make the others secondary servers, which transfer the zone data from the primary server at regular intervals.
Having several name servers distributes workload; it also provides backup. When one name server machine fails in a benign way, like crashing or losing its network connection, all queries will fall back to the other servers. Of course, this scheme doesn't protect you from server malfunctions that produce wrong replies to all DNS requests, such as from software bugs in the server program itself.
You can also run a name server that is not authoritative for any domain.[2] This is useful, as the name server will still be able to conduct DNS queries for the applications running on the local network and cache the information. Hence it is called a caching-only server.
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