choosing a root server(s)

[Cricket Liu]

AndrX Pirard <A.Pirard at ulg.ac.be> wrote in message
news:37820fa0.56999268 at nntp.ulg.ac.be...
> According to what you say, it seems a valid method, to avoid tedious
> maintenance of departmental servers under foreign administration, to
> configure these servers once with root hints to central servers having
> the list of root servers in cache, for example:
>
> .                       99999999        IN      NS      ns1.my.domain.
> ns1.my.domain.          99999999        IN      A       1.2.3.4
> .                       99999999        IN      NS      ns2.my.domain.
> ns2.my.domain.          99999999        IN      A       1.2.4.5
>
> Correct?

That's ugly, but I guess it would work.  Some BIND name servers will use the
root hints if they don't get a response to their system query, which would
have unintended results in your setup.

> I would like however to have a garantee that this method passes an
> upgrade to BIND 8 and to have the following behavior explained.

Hey, I'm not in the business of giving people free guarantees.  :-)

> If I query such a dpt BIND server with '. any', I may get an answer
> listing nsX.my.domain as roots, alone or with other real root servers.
> This answer lasts just for one query. The next query answers the
> correct list of real root servers alone with fresh TTLs.
> So, it seems that the root cache is refreshed on demand and a
> posteriori (those departmental servers are also forwarders, so that
> they rarely use their root cache, which makes the phenomenon visible).
> Is the root cache also initialized on demand (rather than when the
> server starts in a strict sense)?

Yes, in BIND 8 it is.

cricket

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