Help needed: weired name resolving behavior

[Andree Leidenfrost <leidenfrost@dkrz.de>]

I just managed to nail down a problem that appears every now and then
with name resolution. One of our name servers - the first listed in
resolv.conf - is currently down and I was not able to resolve anything
until I changed the order of the nameserver entries in resolv.conf.
Before I did that e.g.

ping www.uni-hamburg.de

just gave me

ping: unknown host www.uni-hamburg.de

after a decent while.

I always thought that the nameserver entries are tried subsequently
until one try succeeds or there is none left and that's what the
resolv.conf man page says, too:

[...]
use  the  name  server  on the local machine.  (The
algorithm used is to try a name server, and if  the
query  times  out,  try the next, until out of name
servers, then repeat trying all  the  name  servers
until a maximum number of retries are made).
[...]

Just for completeness, my (fairly simple) resolv.conf

domain dkrz.de
nameserver 136.172.100.240 136.172.60.68 136.172.60.241

So, am I missing something? Am I doing something wrong?

Some additional remarks:

The name server is not really down, but under maintainance and not
accepting any connections.

An nslookup gives:

gp12:~>nslookup
> set debug
> server 136.172.100.240
> www.uni-hamburg.de
;; res_mkquery(0, www.uni-hamburg.de, 1, 1)
;; res_send()
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 337
;; flags: rd; Ques: 1, Ans: 0, Auth: 0, Addit: 0
;; QUESTIONS:
;;      www.uni-hamburg.de, type = A, class = IN

;; Querying server (# 1) udp address = 136.172.100.240
136.172.100.240 recvfrom: Connection timed out
;; Querying server (# 1) udp address = 136.172.100.240
136.172.100.240 recvfrom: Connection timed out
;; res_send failed
Nameserver niesel.dkrz.de not responding
www.uni-hamburg.de A record not found at niesel.dkrz.de, try again


Regards,

	Andree
-- 
                     | Institute of Geophysics   phone: +49 40 4123 4389
 ANDREE LEIDENFROST  | University of Hamburg       fax: +49 40 4123 5441
    Geophysicist     | Bundesstrasse 55      e-mail: leidenfrost@dkrz.de
                     | D-20146 Hamburg        www: www.app-geoph.dkrz.de


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .