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I run split horizon DNS and have my local DNS server listed before my ISP's in my DHCP server configuration. The order (to me) is important. I want to hit MY dns server always (which does cache), unless it is unavailable, and then I want to hit my ISPs as a fallback only. Is there a suggested way to do this?

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Just from this thread, several:

With dnsmasq: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15231319

With systemd: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15232027

Thanks for the reply, but can you see how the very simple configuration possible on the DHCP server suddenly becomes much much more complicated with the above solutions? You're basically suggesting I run a chef server (or some other central workstation management) in my home to allow talking to machines on my local domain by hostnames.

That's tough to swallow.

Is your setup actually likely to run into situations where the DNS server is unavailable but Internet access is otherwise working? Basic home setups usually have DNS running (if at all) on the same device (router) that’s also acting as a gateway, so such a selective outage would be unlikely except in the event of misconfiguration - and in that case I’d want my setup to fail hard, personally, so I’d know to fix it, rather than having it silently slow down DNS lookups. Thus I wouldn’t intentionally set a public DNS server as an alternative to the primary one on the router. But maybe your setup is more complex, or you have a use case I’m not thinking of...

I run DNS on my file server since it's on all the time anyway. It must fail gracefully or the wife approval factor goes down.

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