Best Practices for Authoritative Servers

[Kevin Darcy]

Jim McAtee wrote:
> From: "Kevin Darcy"
>
>   
>> But, we have a few zones here and there that we slave from
>> business partners, and we've occasionally run into problems with the
>> master becoming unavailable and the cross-connected slaves continuing
>> to serve up a stale version. I'll have to put more thought into how
>> to prevent that from happening.
>>     
>
> What's the reason to have slaves cross-connected like this?  Isn't that 
> the whole purpose of the expiry in the SOA?  Is there anything 
> (performance?) to be gained by treating other slaves as masters? 
>
>   
As mentioned previously, the purpose is so that when the primary master 
goes down, all of the slaves eventually get the latest available version 
of the zone.

It's for robustness not performance. Sometimes when a primary master 
goes down it's because something cataclysmic is occurring (data center 
outage, natural disaster, whatever) in which case it might be *critical* 
for all recent updates to be replicated as widely as possible.

                                                                         
                           - Kevin