BIND - sorting of reverse domain.

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "D" == D Stussy <kd6lvw at bde-arc.ampr.org> writes:

    D> Then explain to me why when I have a primary forward zone
    D> organized in order of IP address (for my convenience) which is
    D> NOT alphabetical order, the secondaries' written copies have
    D> the names in alphabetical order.  If BIND didn't care, then why
    D> is going out of its way to do this?

You misled us. You never said anything about the copies of the zone
files on the slave (secondary servers) before. For these files, you
should not even be looking at them. What the server puts in these
files is an implementation issue: they don't even need to be ASCII
files in RFC1035 format. All that matters there is the files are a
truthful representation of the zone as it is defined on the master
server.

You should not be making any assumptions about how a slave server
writes these files. [IIRC BIND[48] wrote the zone contents out in an
essentially random order.] If they are written in alphabetical order
in BIND9, it's probably a side effect of the way the server traverses
the internal data structure (a red-black tree) for a zone. This could
change: for example if a different data structure or traversal
algorithm was used.

The ordering of resource records in a zone file does not matter to
BIND at all. It only cares that the RRs in the file are syntactically
and semantically correct when it loads the zone file.