Hints zones besides "."

Cricket Liu cricket at acmebw.com
Tue Aug 10 02:13:34 UTC 1999


Okay, does this make any sense?

Now that I'm designing DNS architectures with conditional forwarding, I'm
beginning to realize that I need a mechanism to prime arbitrary name servers
with a list of NS RRs for internal apex zones.  I can do that in one of two
ways today:

- Make the name server a slave for the apex zones
- Make the name server a stub for the apex zones

The first option is right out, because we don't want as many slaves as we
have internal name servers.  The second option is what I'm currently using,
but it 1) seems wrong aestetically, 2) can be wasteful, since we track zone
refresh and requery even if the NS RRs haven't changed and 3) is prone to
widespread failure if the master is lost for an extended period.

So what about non-root hints zones?

Semantically, these would work just like the root hints zone does.  The
presence of a zone statement like:

zone "acmebw.com" {
    type hint;
    file "db.acmebw.com";
};

could also imply

zone "acmebw.com" {
    type hint;
    file "db.acmebw.com";
    forwarders {};
};

since it doesn't make much sense to forward if you just asked for the NS
RRs.  It's robust, since you can lose all but one of the acmebw.com name
servers and still function.  And it seems aestetically "correct," in my
opinion.

Comments?

cricket



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