Sortlist and individual zones

[Brian Miller]

Barry Margolin wrote:
> In article <bv6kd7$747$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
>  Brian Miller <bmiller at telstra.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have been asked to look into setting up out companies internal DNS to
>>return different IP addreesses for a specific RR based upon the location of
>>the client (clients in each state get the IP address of a local server).
>>
>>I can differentate between the clients easily enough based on their network,
>>and it looks like I could do what's needed with the "sortlist" option.
> 
> 
> I don't think this will work as you hope.  Clients don't generally query 
> authoritative nameservers directly, they query their local caching 
> nameserver, and the caching server recurses to contact the authoritative 
> servers.  Unless the caching server's admnistrator has overridden the 
> default settings, it will perform its own round-robin rotation of the 
> addresses, losing the ordering that you set up with sortlist.
> 
> What you need to use is views.  You'd need a different version of the 
> zone file for each block of addresses, containing just the server for 
> that area.
> 

Thanks for that.

I know that views is a BIND 9 feature that will do as I want, but how
will the authorative name server know the IP address of the client if 
they have gone via an intermediate cache server? Is this passed in the 
refered request from the caching server to the actual master? I had a 
quick look at a few refered requests with Ethereal and didn't see the 
clients IP address in the request.

Brian Miller