I've been using Linode's DNS servers without any glitches for close to a year now. This morning, the brief outage at the Dallas location ( http://status.linode.com/2010/05/network.html ) ended up with my monitoring service reporting "Err: unknown host" for my primary website until network connectivity was restored at the Dallas location. I have 4 of linode's DNS servers (ns1,ns2,ns3,ns4 in that order) listed as authoritative for that domain. (confirmed with dig +nssearch example.com)
My questions are:
1) Why would I be getting "Err: unknown host" when only one of the DNS servers was unreachable? I thought that was the whole reason multiple DNS servers were listed...
2) Should/can I setup my DNS differently to mitigate outages like this? Am I missing something?

Thanks for any thoughts or advice (now back to bed with me )

-John

there was a dns outage also, ns1-4 went down while ns5 stayed up.

linode haven't even acknowledge there was a dns problem, let a lone give an explanation as to what went wrong.

There was a configuration problem which we've identified and prevented from recurring by making a correction.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Regards,
-Chris

That's great to hear. Maybe the status post should be updated to clarify this? I was looking for info on the DNS problem too, and not everybody reads the forums.