Another way to find the primary server for a zone

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:41 PM +0200 5/10/01, ELISABETH.CHORQUES at ALCATEL.FR wrote:

>  I have read that to find the primary server for a zone, we have to read the
>  "SOA" record for the zone and to check if the name of the server is 
>given in the
>  first field of the record like that:

	Putting the name of the nameserver in the SOA record is a 
*convention*.  It is by no means whatsoever a *requirement*.  Indeed, 
this is really just a label that isn't used by anything or anyone 
(that I know of), so you could actually put just about anything you 
want in there.  And many, many people screw it up.

>   can we read the named.conf file instead of the SOA record and check the
>  declaration of the zone ? If the zone is declared "master" in this 
>file, is it
>  satisfactory to say that the DNS is primary for the zone ?

	The only true way to determine if a nameserver is supposed to be 
authoritative for the zone is to check the /etc/named.conf file and 
see if there is a "primary" or "secondary" label for that zone.  If 
so, then assuming that the zone is not munged, then that server 
should be authoritative for that zone.

	However, even if there is a "primary" line for the zone in that 
file, the contents of that file could still be copied over from 
somewhere else (e.g., via rcp or rsync), and actually generated on a 
totally different machine.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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