First, please excuse the newbie-ness of this question. DNS always makes me paranoid, so I wanted to check first

I am in the process of moving all of my domains from Slicehost to Linode. I use Dreamhost as my domain registrar. Unfortunately, the Dreamhost web app for modifying WHOIS information only allows 4 nameservers to be specified.

Are there any adverse side effects when a WHOIS record contain ns1-ns4.linode.com (without ns5.linode.com) while having all 5 NS records listed in each domain zone?

Thanks!

- Ricci

[~] whois iccir.info | grep :NS 
Name Server:NS1.LINODE.COM
Name Server:NS2.LINODE.COM
Name Server:NS3.LINODE.COM
Name Server:NS4.LINODE.COM

[~] dig ns iccir.info | grep "NS"  
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;iccir.info.         IN   NS
;; ANSWER SECTION:
iccir.info.      86396   IN   NS   ns2.linode.com.
iccir.info.      86396   IN   NS   ns3.linode.com.
iccir.info.      86396   IN   NS   ns5.linode.com.
iccir.info.      86396   IN   NS   ns1.linode.com.
iccir.info.      86396   IN   NS   ns4.linode.com.

Not really. Just the obvious one: Clients won't ever send their first query to ns5. But since there are 4 others, it doesn't matter.

The only other side effect is that some DNS configuration checking tools will whine at you, but you can safely ignore it. (Edit: Those tools are right to be concerned. Such configuration inconsistencies are often serious problems. This time it's okay, though.)

Silly of your registrar not to allow more nameservers, though. Maybe you should switch to a different one that puts more effort into it.

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Thanks for the reply! That's what I was thinking, but I wanted to be absolutely sure before I modified the WHOIS for my main domains.