third DNS server for redundancy

Hi all,

I am new to this so please be patient.

I have been asked to administer for my boss due to my "experience" in IT/helpdesk support.
I have never administered before so now i find myself in trouble sometimes.

here's today's question.

We host sites. We have 2 Windows 2000 SRV's:
SRV1 : running Master DNS , SQL 2000 and MDaemon
SRV2 : running IIS 5 and DNS (secondary)

No active Directory. Workgroup, No domain.

Question:

I have been asked to bring up a 3rd SRV with W2k to provide redundancy with all SQL, DNS, and Web services.

I am now concentrating on DNS.

Now, I have SRV1 NS1.mydomain.com with primary zones as master DNS and SRV2 NS2.mydomain.com getting its Zone Info through zone transfer from SRV1 for its secondary zones.

My question is more towaors design than anything else. When I bring SRV3 up... how should I build DNS services??? as a second Master DNS with its own local DNS db or as anotehr secondary DNS server getting its info from SRV1 for its zones??

what would be a smart design??

thanks
D

You can't have more than one Master. So that answer is: another secondary.
BTW if this 3rd server resides in the same physical location as the other two, it doesn't do redundancy but likely a loss on reliability when one of the 3 goes down, you can't deny the fact that M$ OS has a poor uptime records.

Interesting point. LikeI said I am new to this. My boss want 3 DNS servers to guarantee no downtime, including DNS services.. You think 3 DNS servers for same service, same location is more likely to give us trouble than to actually help ?

Exactly. And imagine when someone queries your DNS, your server1 and server2 each gets 50/50 chance (Many DNS illiterate people believe server1 is the one being queried first, then server2, server3 and so on) and are being queried randomly. When a server3 is added, the chance becomes 33/33/33 (forget the round off). Mathematically you should get 66% when one goes down. At the same time, when additional server is added, the down time rate (all 3 combined) goes up.
Anyway, if you are not having consistent uptime problem for the first two, don't reinvent the wheel by introducing a 3rd server. It'd serve redundancy if your 3rd server resides elsewhere but that's not the case in your situation.