start of authority shortcut??

Barry Margolin barmar at bbnplanet.com
Sun Nov 7 05:38:06 UTC 1999


In article <38245E99.6DD38A71 at op.net>, Daniel Frazier  <dfrazier at op.net> wrote:
>I have two production SCO servers that I set up bind version 8.1.1 on a
>while ago.  I was only using dns for internal name resolution, so I
>kinda breezed thru setting it up and didn't really take the time to try
>to really learn it.  One of the things that I included was a named.soa
>file,
>and at the top of each of the other relevant files I just put... 
>
>$INCLUDE named.soa
>
>Finally my company is bringing its web and email servers in house, and I
>set up a master dns server on our firewall and made the two SCO boxes
>slaves.  I bought the O'Reilly book DNS and Bind and took the time to
>figure everything out.  Nowhere in any example I could find was there
>mention of this soa shortcut.  Is it valid?  Is it safe?

Sure, as long as you remember to increment the serial number in the file
any time you update any file that includes it.

Whether it's a good idea is another issue.  When you do it this way, a
change to one zone will cause them all appear to have been updated, so the
secondary servers will have to transfer them all.  If you only have a
couple of zones it's probably not a big deal, but if you had thousands of
zones it could be a problem.  Also, if the secondary servers are at your
ISP, they have to deal with many customers' zones; imagine if every
customer did it this way, it would result in lots of extraneous zone
transfers.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.


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