Slaves or Forwarders?

[Baird, Josh]

Hi,

In the past, when I have had a requirement to bring a slave zone into our environment; I created a slave zone on my master(s) (defining the external nameserver as a master) and then created slave zones on my slaves using *my* master as a master (not the master outside of my environment).  This seems to work well and makes management easier on my end.  Is this method of 'sub-slaves' considered an acceptable practice?

Some folks also like to use forwarders if they don't have the capability to slave the zone.  In this scenario, I would have to create a 'forward' zone on each of my caching servers that forwards requests for 'xyz.com' to the up-stream nameserver authoritative for the zone.  Given the choice of creating forwarders or slaving the zone into my environment, which is preferred?  I would think that slaving the zone would be the preferred method, since my master/slaves could still serve the zone if the up-stream/forwarder becomes unreachable (until my slave expires).  In my infrastructure, it just so happens that managing slave zones across our environment is also simpler than managing independent forward zone(s) on each of our servers as well.

Any thoughts/suggestions are appreciated!

Thanks,

Josh