Make aliases that don't transfer?

[Jeff Lightner]

It's "a hack" - ok I'll buy that though I inherited the setup.  Is it a
bad idea though?  Should I really make separate zone files for every
domain when all we really use is a single web site to service them all?


We have a single domain for email and all other purposes.   It is only
because we have multiple business entities that we use separate domain
names (essentially to insure people looking for us find our main web
site).  What is the downside to using such "a hack"?   

I can live with the multiple zone transfers (especially given that if I
DID separate into individual zone files I'd still have multiple zone
transfers) but was just curious if there was a way to configure named
not to transfer a given zone file.   Doing rsync wouldn't turn off zone
transfers.  I'd still want my main zone files (the unaliased ones) to
transfer.   Are you implying it is all or nothing?  If so why do I need
to configure each zone?

-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users-bounce at isc.org [mailto:bind-users-bounce at isc.org] On
Behalf Of Kevin Darcy
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2007 7:08 PM
To: bind-users at isc.org
Subject: Re: Make aliases that don't transfer?

Always remember that the use of a single file as the source data for 
multiple zones is a *hack*. named loads that data as separate zones, and

that's the way they are viewed in protocol terms, including zone 
transfers -- as separate zones. As John Wobus pointed out, if you want 
to treat *files* as *files* instead of *zones*, you could use an 
out-of-band mechanism, such as rsync, to replicate your data. Some 
caveats of doing things that way:
1) If you care about security at all, you'd want to set up a trust 
relationship so that no-one can spoof the data,
2) You might need to open up additional ports in your firewall(s), if
any,
3) You'd need some way of getting the "slave" nameservers (defined as 
"master" for the zone(s) in question) to reload/refresh the data 
whenever it changes since, unlike with AXFR/IXFR, this is not automatic.

 

                           - Kevin

Jeff Lightner wrote:
> We have multiple domains that are aliased to our main domain.   This
> works fine.
> I've noticed on doing zone updates and transfers from master to slave
> that it essentially transfers the alias zone file for EACH aliased
> domain.   This seems unnecessary since the zone file is a single one
for
> all these domains so it seems the transfer for the first alias should
be
> sufficient.   I was curious how I would insure it only transferred
once.
> Is there a type other than "master" or "slave" or should I just take
out
> the "allow transfer" line?   I don't want to delete the entry entirely
> from the slave for obvious reasons.
>
> Example from my master:
> zone "4waters.com" {
>         type master;
>         file "watercom-aliases";
>         allow-transfer { watercom; };
> };
>
> >From my slave:
> zone "4waters.com" {
>         type slave;
>         file "watercom-aliases";
>         masters { 10.0.21.21; };
>         allow-transfer { watercom; };
> };
>
>
>
>
>
>