Forwarding a subzone of a master zone

[Chris Buxton]

You're getting a bit confused, because your configuration is complex. Some of your observations are in contradiction with your disabling of recursion, so I believe you are partially mistaken.

- You're mixing authoritative and recursive service in one config. This often leads to confusion.
- Your recursion algorithm must be able to track down a particular domain while not being able to resolve from the Internet root.

Rather than turning off recursion, why not just set up your own root zone (type master)? That way, your server can recurse to sub.example.com based on the delegation, while returning immediate negative answers for anything unknown. Just make sure you delegate example.com (and all other zones) from your private root zone.

A forwarders list in example.com or a zone of type forward named sub.example.com will not have any effect so long as recursion is disabled. Forwarding is a configuration aspect of the recursion algorithm.

Regards,
Chris Buxton
BlueCat Networks

On Apr 18, 2011, at 11:57 PM, Olivier Cherrier wrote:

> 	Hi,
> 
> I am experiencing problems to get a working forwarding configuration.
> 
> 
> I am using BIND 9.3.6-P1 and the server has the global recursion parameter
> on. The server is not on a public network (not on Internet -- no access
> to root servers).
> 
> 
> I have a zone called "example.com" for which the server is master.
> A delegation called "sub.example.com" is in place and is working well.
> 
> I want to change the recursion parameter from 'yes' to 'no' in order to
> get rid of the timeouts we get when we query something that is not
> defined in our DNS server (like www.google.com).
> Doing this breaks the delegation "sub.example.com", meaning the server
> doesn't do the research anymore for the subzone.
> So I deleted the delegation and configured a forward zone to the right
> IP addresses.  The problem is named doesn't even try to query those
> forwarders and directly reply: "No answer"
> 
> While it works for some other forwarded zones (reverse and non-reverse),
> I fail to understand why it doesn't work for that particular zone.
> The only difference I see is that this forwarded zone is a subzone of
> "example.com" for which the server is master.
> 
> So my question: Is there any limitation to forward a subzone while we
> are master for the parent zone?
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> Best regards.
> 
> -- 
> Olivier Cherrier - Symacx.com
> mailto:oc at symacx.com
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