Balancing load between two DNS servers

Help!
1

I have a net with 2 DNS servers (master & slave), but I don’t want clients to ask directly to them. So, in the same net, I have a debian machine with haproxy 1.7.5 installed. I want clients to have in their /etc/resolv.conf file the IP of the proxy. I want the proxy to balance the load between the two servers.

IP DNS master = 10.10.24.2
IP DNS slave = 10.10.24.4
IP PROXY = 10.10.24.5

In the file /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg at the end, I added:

resolvers mydns
    nameservers dns1 10.10.24.2:53
    nameservers dns2 10.10.24.4:53

Then I start haproxy:

haproxy -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

If I execute in the proxy:

netstat -tuna

I get these two new lines:

udp    0    0    10.10.24.5:35000    10.10.24.2:53    ESTABLISHED
udp    0    0    10.10.24.5:35000    10.10.24.4:53    ESTABLISHED

But I was expecting to receive something like this:

udp    0    0    10.10.24.5:53    10.10.24.2:53    ESTABLISHED
udp    0    0    10.10.24.5:53    10.10.24.4:53    ESTABLISHED

Obviously, the DNS requests from clients to the proxy aren’t working…

Is it possible to achieve this using haproxy?

2

Hello,

You can’t load balance UDP with haproxy. That’s not what the dns resolvers command in haproxy is for. You’d need a udp load balancer. You can use nginx for this if you do a custom compile.

/Dave

2 Likes
3

Okay, thank you very much!!

4

dnsdist (or just iptables or pf rules
depending on your needs and platform) is for load balancing DNS. Using nginx for this is a poor choice.

1 Like