[lostlogin]

> I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google.

I was under the impression that there was no such thing as primary and secondary for DNS, just ‘here is one’ and ‘here is another’, with someone going for a terrible naming system of ‘primary’ and secondary’. I’m no expert and my knowledge come from messing about with Pihole and reading their documentation.

[jmcnulty]

The first nameserver listed in resolv.conf is kind of a primary as it will always be consulted first, unless you add "options rotate". The next nameserver only come into play if the first doesn't respond (default 5 seconds, also tunable with options). They're not named primary/secondary in the file but could be considered that way.

[nwmcsween]

Don't rely on this behaviour, many DNS libraries, will query all or n to save on latency.