this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Edit: Apparently years of seeing it called primary and secondary led to a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works lol. Just use a pi and ad guard.
Randomly? No, only when your pi goes down. Or when ever you're looking at something that gets around the simple DNS based ad filtering pinhole does. It's foolish to spend twice as much money for this level of fail over protection to prevent ads. It's not like if you see an ad you're going to die lol. If you're that opposed to them, sure, go for it, but you're better off spending your time doing other things to stop ads than maintaining two pi holes because one might fail.
And like the other person said, just use ad guard's public DNS. I use it on my router and on my phone.
Not how secondary DNS works. It round robins the requests across primary and secondary DNS servers.
Why call it secondary then, that's so counterintuitive lol 😭 I guess "the second hardest problem in computer science" applies because I can't think of a better name either.
I don't think that's even the official naming. It probably comes from what Windows 95 called it back in the day:
On Linux, it's just an additional "nameserver x.x.x.x" line in
/etc/resolv.conf, with no indication of which is the "primary" or "secondary".Different Operating Systems call it different things. Windows calls it Alternate. Even if it was only used when the primary was down, DNS doesn't provide any sort of guidance or standard on when to switch between primary and secondary. Is one query timeout enough to switch? How often do you reattempt to the first DNS server? When do you switch back? With individual queries, you can timeout and hit another NS server, but that's a lot easier at an individual level than to infer a global system state from one query timing out.