8.4.4 reverse zone problems

Chris De Young chd at arizona.edu
Tue May 25 23:22:08 UTC 2004


On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 05:43:52PM -0500, David Price wrote:
> I am having a problem with a BIND 8.4.4 server refusing to recognize a 
> reverse zone.
> 
> I have a /20 block of IPs, for example lets say: 10.20.192.0/20. The 
> zone command in the named.conf looks like [[zone "20.10.in-addr.arpa" { 
> type master; file "20.10.in-addr.arpa.hosts"; };]]. 

Ok, though this really asserts authority for the whole /16.  This will
be a Bad Thing when you try to resolve addresses that are in
10.20.0.0/16 but not in 10.20.192.0/20.

> For some reason 8.4.4 behaves as if the zone command isn't even in
> the named.conf file - it fails to respond to dig against the reverse
> zone.

What do you get from dig?  Timeout?  NXDOMAIN?  Somehting else?  Any
errors when you load the zone?

> work for the 192.20.10.in-addr.arpa records anyway. So I'm thinking 
> there may be a problem with Bind 8.4.4 not recognizing the 
> larger-than-a-standard-C-block reverse zone.

It's not really an address block at all, it's just namespace.
Concepts like "class A/B/C/D" and CIDR notation are routing elements,
and the things in DNS that look similar to them are really just naming
conventions.  (They are conventions that are enforced to some extent
by the way resolutions are done, but the point is that the contraints
upon DNS and the contraints imposed by routing don't usually have a lot
to do with each other.)  There's no reason that the zone
"192.20.10.in-addr.arpa" couldn't have 500 records in it, for example,
or 1000.

I don't know specifically about any issues with Bind 8.4.4, but I've
been doing DNS for /16 blocks of in-addr addresses for awhile using
bind 8.2.4 primaries and bind 9 secondaries without trouble.

-Chris



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