REQUEST: Network Interface Failover and multi-DNS resolution

[Carlos Rodrigues]

I have a box with two ethernet cards, each one connected to a different 
local network ("staff" and "students"). Each one of the networks has a 
DNS server to resolve internal names.

The problem is: I can only resolve hosts that are on the eth0 connected 
LAN ("staff"). To access hosts on the other network I have to use their 
IP address directly.

This prompts me to request two features (independent of each other):

   1. be able to resolve names using both DNSes;
   2. that there be some failover for network connections.

By failover I mean being able to define one interface as "primary". The 
primary interface would set the default gateway and all that 
global-unique stuff (including resolv.conf, without feature 1.).
When that interface goes down, those global settings are changed to the 
ones provided by another active interface. If the primary interface goes 
up again, it restores the initial configuration.

This would be very useful for cases such as a laptop with wired and 
wireless networking. The "wired" connection would be the primary 
interface. The "wireless" connection would take over if the "wired" one 
goes down (they may be different networks, e.g. we have a totally open 
and untrusted wireless lan and our linux users can't just unplug the 
cable and move around, they are forced to restart the interfaces).

Both of these work in windows, FYI.

I guess that feature 1. is not at the distro level, however I don't 
really know where uptream to suggest it.

If feature 2. is feasible I could put it in bugzilla, don't really know 
under which package though.

Carlos Rodrigues