Managing Mission - Critical Domains and DNS

Primary Nameserver

The primary nameserver is the authoritative nameserver that contains the actual zonedata from which all other authoritative nameservers obtain their copy. Traditionally, since the vast majority of nameservers still run BIND, this means the nameserver is the source of the zonedata being served. Secondary or slave nameservers typically have local storage for the zonedata they are mirroring from their masters.

Today, increasingly more production platforms are using PowerDNS or other nameservers, where the distinction may be further blurred when using a database backend. However, even in those cases, the secondaries will typically have a local replication of the database.