[bind10-dev] Zone loading requirements, take 1

[Evan Hunt]

> * In principle one can load a zone with data at the same name as a
>   CNAME. It's not supposed to be allowed, but I can imagine an
>   administrator wanting to serve such a zone anyway. What does BIND 9
>   do if this happens? What should we do?

The zone won't load in BIND 9.

> * If no TTL is specified at all, RFC 1035 is ambiguous. I have
>   specified this as a warning, and we use 3600. I think this is what
>   BIND 9 does, but I'm not sure.

It logs a warning and uses SOA MINTTL if the SOA happens to be the first
thing in the file; otherwise it rejects the file.

> * I looked through all 11 tests that BIND 9 has for zone loading. We'll
>   have a few more. ;) One test confuses me:
>  [...]
>    How can this possibly load properly? Doesn't the first record of a
>    zone have to be an SOA record? (And yes the comment for the
>    configuration is wrong, it is test 10 not test 9.)

There is no "first" record.  By convention we put the SOA first and NS
after, and both are required, but they don't need to be in any particular
order.

The reason that test works is that it's not a zone-loading test, it's a
masterfile-parsing test.

-- 
Evan Hunt -- each at isc.org
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.