On Monday 25 January 2010 09:35, Roland Roland wrote:

it's all working fine, right now i want to change the main public dns from one IP to another to do some testing (the new public dns ip has records which the old one doesnt have and it's done as such for testing)

so i got into /etc/resolv.conf and changed the first nameserver to the NEW public DNS. /etc/init.d/network restart /etc/init.d/named restart

when i issue an nslookup example.com ON the dns server, i get the exact IP i want to do testing on. but when i do nslookup example.com on the clients machine. the website resolves to another IP ( the one set in the initial public dns records)

Hmmm, sounds like you change the resolv.conf on the DNS server and not the clients machine. In this case every thing worked as it is supposed to.

If you are just testing then might I suggest you do it like this. On the clients machine type in the following:

nslookup <host your want to lookup> <IP address of test dns server>

or if DIG is installed;

dig @<IP address of test dns server> <host your want to lookup>

This will cause nslookup and/or DIG to use the DNS server you want to test.

is there any other changes i need to do for the DNS server redirects its requests to the new public dns ?

resolv.conf does not direct and queries that come in to the DNS server. It is for the servers use only. Lookups and serving a zone at two totally different processes.