Primary/Secondary (Was: Master/Slave)

[Greg Choules]

Hi Paul.
What's a "primary master" as opposed to (presumably?) a "secondary master"?

Maybe there are just too many combinations and permutations of type of box
for a single word to convey all meanings, though I haven't encountered any
yet. Even in an environment like Active Directory, where all servers
running the DNS role are primary, I wouldn't distinguish between them: they
are all just "primary".

For me, the words "master" and "slave" conjure up periods in human
history we should not go back to, hence they are loaded terms and we
shouldn't be using them.

In DNS terms, for me, a "primary" has the single source of truth for data
in zones and a "secondary" transfers a temporary copy of that data from a
primary, or from another secondary (though daisy chain secondaries at your
peril). All are authoritative, only one is the reference version.

Cheers, Greg
/soapbox

On Thu, 6 Feb 2025 at 14:19, Paul Kosinski via bind-users <
bind-users at lists.isc.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 1 Feb 2025 09:11:32 +0100
> Ondřej Surý <ondrej at isc.org> wrote:
>
> > Hey,
> >
> > since you've asked about ISC recommendations and good practice,
> > we prefer to use the current DNS terminology as defined in RFC 8499[1]
> > that says:
> >
> > > Although early DNS RFCs such as [RFC1996] referred to this as a
> "master",
> > > the current common usage has shifted to "primary".
>
>
> I looked up RFC8499 and found that although the definitions of Master and
> Slave appear (only) as references to Primary and Secondary, the old terms
> still are used extensively in the bodies of the definitions. (Not to
> mention that it would be rather confusing to have "Primary master" defined
> as a reference to "Primary primary".)
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