Tuning for lots of SERVFAIL responses

Dave Warren davew at hireahit.com
Fri Feb 19 01:02:17 UTC 2016


On 2016-02-18 14:06, Mark Andrews wrote:
> For some reason people are afraid to slave internal zones.  Back
> when I was working for CSIRO I used to slave all the internal zones
> for all of the sites the division had.  Each site administered its
> own zones but all sites slaved all of them.  That way local and
> inter site lookups always succeeded even when the external links
> were down.

While I avidly prefer slaving internal zones, it becomes one more thing 
to maintain, monitor and support, and for every failure point they 
eliminate, the zone transfers themselves become a failure point and 
maintenance task.

I've had issues with Microsoft DNS in particular (when fully integrated 
with Active Directory) periodically losing the list of IPs allowed to 
request zone transfers, although I think it was Server 2008 (pre R2) 
when this last happened. Similarly, if you frequently add and remove 
zones, you've now created an extra task to add the zone to all internal 
resolvers, rather than just using NS records and letting DNS do what it 
does best and recursively resolve. This too can be automated, obviously.

The tipping point for me is that by slaving my internal zones, I can 
effectively do instant DNS updates during normal operations rather than 
having internal resolvers maintain their own cache -- This alone makes 
it worthwhile to slave all of my zones everywhere possible.

Still, if you're not big enough to automate everything, I can see the 
advantage in having your resolvers be as ignorant about internal 
infrastructure as possible.

-- 
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren




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