Recursion off\forward

[Kevin Darcy]

Mark Andrews wrote:
>> We are running a bind 9.2.4 on a Solaris 10 box for internal only use.
>> Here is the senario.
>>  
>> When I have rescursion off and I have the following statement 
>>
>> zone "developmentrim.com" {
>>         type forward;
>>         forwarders { 10.222.222.22; };
>> };
>>  
>> and I perform a lookup for developmentrim.com I do not get a response
>>  
>> however I can perform the same lookup against the 10.222.222.22 with a
>> positive response.
>> ---
>> I then turn recursion on and it work fine.
>>  
>> Is there a way to have recusion off and a forward zone working?
>>     
>
> 	No.
>  
>   
To expand on that a little, you're essentially asking for BIND to 
support mutually-contradictory modes of operation. "recursion no" 
basically means "answer only from one's own authoritative zones, 
otherwise respond with a referral", and forwarding basically means "go 
out and fetch the data and return it, if the answer is *not*already*in* 
one's authoritative zones or in the cache". Since a given answer can't 
be both in and not in a nameserver's authoritative data simultaneously, 
you can't really mix forwarding with no-recursion.

Frankly I'm not sure why anyone would turn off recursion for an 
internal-only box anyway, except (as in our case, with respect to one 
particular box) as a way to discourage folks from misconfiguring their 
stub resolvers to point to it.

                                                                         
                           - Kevin