Clarification on Comments in Bind 9.2

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Jain" == Jain Manish <JManish at novell.com> writes:

    Jain> Hi All, As we know that Bind 9.2 support comments in both
    Jain> named.conf and zone.db file. Recently, I found that during
    Jain> zone transfer, comments entered in the primary zone's file
    Jain> are not being transferred to the secondary. I think this is
    Jain> the expected behavior of Bind 9.2. Can somebody correct me,
    Jain> if I am wrong in this assumption?

You are wrong. The DNS zone transfer protocol replicates zones, not
zone files. And anyway name servers ignore comments in zone files when
they load them. 

    Jain> Why the comments from primary are being lost during the zone-in?

Because the comments didn't make it in to the in-memory representation
of the zone when it was loaded on to the server. Not that they'd get
transferred anyway as the comments by definition cannot be resource
records which would mean they got transferred by the zone transfer
protocol.

    Jain> Is there any plan to support in Bind 9.2 for retaining
    Jain> the comments during zone-in?

No. If you want to copy zone files about, use a file copy protocol like
ftp or scp.

Note too that some DNS implementations don't have zone files. This is
why there's a zone transfer protocol to replicate a zone's contents.
That isolates transfers from the underlying implementation method for
defining the contents of a zone: ascii file, database, LDAP back-end, etc.