slave zone without "file" statement?

[Chris Thompson]

On Jan 4 2009, andrew kagan wrote:

>Hi All: I just brought a new 9.6.0 slave server online on freebsd 7. In
>my configuration file, I added all the zones with a configuration like:
>
>zone "myzone" IN { type slave; masters {xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx}; };
>
>note that I left out the "file" statement.
>
>When I reload BIND  I see the zones being loaded from the master, and my 
>query log shows the server answering queries...everything looks OK, but 
>I don't see any backup files being created anywhere.

How would it know where to put them?

>Is BIND just loading the zone data into RAM? 

Yes. There is no difference from previous versions of BIND here.

>                                             Is this a really bad idea?

Yes. Every time the slave nameserver is restarted it will have to fetch
the zones from the master again, and if the master is down at the time,
it will not be able to answer queries about them until it comes back.

In fact, it's such a bad idea that I'm not really sure why BIND continues
to allow omitting "file" for a type slave (or stub) zone, or at least why
it doesn't issue a big fat warning about about it.

-- 
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 at cam.ac.uk