Slaves, Secondary, Primary, Master Autoritative?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <8ct16a$8lt$1 at news.rocsoft.net>,
Bruce D. Meyer <chipsumm at rocsoft.net> wrote:
>I think I am confused, but am not certain. (Dang, that's confused)
>
>What makes a name server authoritative?

On a master server, loading the zone into memory and not detecting any
syntax errors.

On a slave server, loading the zone into memory, not detecting any syntax
errors, and the zone not having expired due to too many failures trying to
refresh from the master.

>Is a slave the same as a secondary server?

Yes.

>Is a Master the same as a Primary server?

Yes.

>Can a Slave or Secondary be authoritative?

They should be.

>Is putting your two names servers in Internic as your primary and secondary
>cause them to both be authoritative?

No.  It tells everyone else that they're supposed to be authoritative.

>I have this setup:
>
>ns.rocsoft.net as primary
>www2.rocsoft.net as secondary.
>
>www2 get's it's zone files via zone transfer each time serial numbers are
>updated.  Doesn't that mean that www2 is a salve or secondary server?

Yes.

>For some odd reason, when I let www2 run (It is off right now) ALL my dns
>queries seem to be answered by that machine, even though ns.rocsoft.net is
>my primary (Or so I thought) server.

No one else knows or cares which servers are primary or secondary, that's
only the concern of the administrators.  Other servers send their queries
to whichever server has the best response time record.  If www2 is much
faster than ns, it will get most queries.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
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