BIND limits and performance questions

[Morris Balamut]

Hi

It is my understanding that BIND limits the number of name servers in a zone
to 16. What does that really mean? 
Was that also the case for BIND 4.x? How does it enforce that limit? and
what happens if the limit is exceeded, 
are some name servers ignored?  What kind of impact might a user experience?

I have a customer currently running a version of BIND 4.x and most zones
have 19 master name servers defined (and 
there are a fair amount of zones).  They are planning to migrate to 8.2.x in
the near future and I am concerned that 
there will be a problem? What kind of consequences can they expect? 

What are the pros and cons of having multiple master name servers?

This same customer has significant number of zones that are managed by a
different organization within the company.
This group has its own set of name servers and typically they have one or
two masters per zone, however virtually all these
zones have the 19 name servers discussed earlier defined as secondary name
servers.

This is complicated by existing company policies that allow virtually any
domain to any address or range of addresses
on their network. They have, at last count, 55 top level domains and at
least 1000+ subdomains. In addition the network
is world-wide.

It would seem to me that they must be violating some 'rules'. They have
intermittent problems that they have not been able
to track down. It would seem to me that the zone transfers alone could make
the name servers 'crazy'.

I would appreciate any information / feedback you can provide. Thanks.

Morris Balamut, Sr. Network Support Engineer
Nortel Networks
mbalamut at nortelnetworks.com

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