Secondary Server

Barry Margolin barmar at bbnplanet.com
Thu Mar 16 01:04:11 UTC 2000


In article <8ap70d$gqf$1 at readme.uio.no>,
Johan Fredrik Öhman <johan at essay.org> wrote:
>> 1. BIND 4.9 stopped allowing multiple zones in the same file.
>>
>> 2. Even when it was allowed, zone transfers only transferred the zone you
>> actually requested, not the other data that happened to come from the same
>> zone file.
>
>Thanks for your answer.
>
>I'm a little disapointet that there is no such feature in bind ?

It's not BIND that's missing the feature, it's the DNS protocol.  If it
were in the protocol, BIND would presumably support it.

>Woudn't it be nice if a future version of bind Bind supported automaticly
>polling of all domain names on secondary server ?   This would lower the
>amount of administration a scondary nameserver requiers....

And allow customers to overload their ISP's nameservers.  Suppose 10
disgruntled customers got together and each added 1000 domains to their
servers -- we'd suddenly see 10,000 new zones on our secondaries.  No
thanks, we'll stick to adding zones manually, so that we have some control.

Would you also want it to delete zones on the secondary server
automatically?  No thanks, either.  If someone accidentcally deletes a zone
on the primary, the secondaries should continue to serve it until the
expire time runs out.  The purpose of secondary servers is to be there when
something is wrong with the primary, and accidental zone deletion counts.

Compared to all the other work of operating DNS servers, adding zones to
secondaries is trivial.  If you maintain both the primary and secondaries,
so that the above concerns aren't a problem, it's simple to automate it
using techniques outside the DNS protocol.

-- 
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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