Questions about BIND and NOTIFY

[Barry Finkel]

I have some questions about RFC 1996 (NOTIFY) and BIND.  The RFC has

>   2.1. The following definitions are used in this document:
>
>   Slave           an authoritative server which uses zone transfer to
>                   retrieve the zone.  All slave servers are named in
>                   the NS RRs for the zone.
>
>   Master          any authoritative server configured to be the source
>                   of zone transfer for one or more slave servers.
>
>   Primary Master  master server at the root of the zone transfer
>                   dependency graph.  The primary master is named in the
>                   zone's SOA MNAME field and optionally by an NS RR.
>                   There is by definition only one primary master server
>                   per zone.

For a given zone, if I have a "Primary Master" and four "Slave"
servers, are all of these five servers considered "Master" by the
above definition?

My reading of the RFC implies that each slave, after it has reloaded a
zone, will send a NOTIFY packet to all of the other slaves (as listed
in the zone's NS records).  The RFC has

>  3.10. If a slave receives a NOTIFY request from a host that is not a
>  known master for the zone containing the QNAME, it should ignore the
>  request and produce an error message in its operations log.

For the NOTIFY to work, this would imply that each of the slaves is a
"Master" according to the definitions in 2.1.

I am seeing with a BIND 8.2.5-REL slave this -- the slave does a zone
transfer from the master and sends NOTIFY packets to the other slaves.
Two of the slaves are on-site and two are off-site.  The two off-site
slaves do not act on the NOTIFY packet; they do not transfer the updated
zone from the master.  And I am trying to determine why.  One of the
off-site masters is BIND 9; I do not know if the other one is BIND 8
or BIND 9.

BIND 8.2.5 does log each "rcvd NOTIFY(zone)"; it appears that BIND 9.2.1
logs only received NOTIFY packets that have errors.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Electronics and Computing Technologies Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994