NS Records - are they queried in order or randomly?

I am pretty sure they are of equal priortity, and so they round robin.

Windows : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787484.aspx
and BIND: http://content.websitegear.com/article/load_balance_dns.htm

Hi both,

Thanks for the responses - I may be wrong here but doesn't Round Robin ( and the link sstone55423 sent ) apply to HOST records within a domain?  ( so provide load balancing for the servers the host record resolves to as opposed to the actual nameserver them selves? )

What I'm trying to determine is if I have two name servers thus:

ns1.myDomain.com
ns2.myDomain.com

But ns2 is on a fairly poor internet connection, are 50% of the queries going to get a poor response OR is that name server only going to be queried if NS1 is down.

As far as I know this will not be specific to a platform ( Windows, BIND, etc ) because any flavour server returns all nameservers so it must be down to the querying server to choose from the list of options.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree completely?

I've upped the pointage of the question!

wheb answer is returned back to requester it is rotated by replying server in round robin fashion
requester will use the first one in the list unless it is not responding or TTL expire

Omar:  Which one is it?  You said it is rounbd robin, and then you said it was not.
 
I am pretty sure that NS record is round robin.  MX records are prioritized, and only round robin if they have the same priority.

Thanks omarfarid,

So basically the DNS servers that a requestor needs to query (for A, CNAME, MX resolution, etc)  are returned in a random order?

Sorry - just trying to get a definitive simply answer!

Thanks again

yes

sstone55423,

Thanks - I did see you references but the Microsoft one specifically seems to refer to Round Robin load balancing for host records ( which is a given ); ie:

multihomed   IN  A  10.0.0.1
multihomed   IN  A  10.0.0.2
multihomed   IN  A  10.0.0.3

My question is regarding the balancing between the name servers before you get to that point.

Ultimately however I have my answer - the secondary DNS server is just as likely to get queried as the primary.

Thanks everyone!!

Actually - just to clarify sstone55423,

You do know that I'm not talking about alias records right?

Sorry all - I'm giving advice to a client based on this so I need to be sure.

I'm upping the points and will split accordingly.

We all endeavor to get that "A" grade.  The "B" grade should only be given if someone answers only a portion of your question.  In this question it would seem that your question was answered completely, and with references to support the answer.

Sorry sstone55423,

I'm haven't used EE since the grading system came in so I'm not sure what the standard is - I graded based purely on what I though reflected how easy was to get the answer.

I will re-think my grading in future.

Do you know - Can I change the grade after I've accepted a solution?

you can request through the community zone to reopen the question and then change grade

I apologize, I didn't mean to give you a difficult time.  I meant it more as a gentle nudge.  It is not that big of a deal for one isolated support event.  Good luck with EE in the future, I hope that I will be able to assist you then.