sneak in RR without SOA

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Christine" == Christine Tran <Christine.Tran at East.Sun.COM> writes:


    Christine>         1) If I have a zone with only one single entry,
    Christine> that is, the zone is top100-jelly.com, and the only
    Christine> entry is @ IN A 11.22.33.44

    Christine>         can I cheat and forget about the SOA record for
    Christine> this zone?

Nope. It doesn't qualify as a zone unless it has exactly one SOA
record and at least one NS record.

    Christine> I already have a fully populated jelly.com
    Christine> zone; in the db file, how if I sneak a FQDN in there
    Christine> like this: apple IN A 11.22.33.1
    Christine>            top100-jelly.com.  IN A 11.22.33.44'
    Christine>            grape IN A 11.22.33.2

You can't do this unless you run very old, bug-ridden and insecure
name server software. Modern name servers will not allow you to put
data for another zone into some zone file. This means you can't put
stuff about top100-jelly.com in the zone file for jelly.com. You could
make an entry for flavour.top100.jelly.com in that zone file because
that name is in the jelly.com domain.

    Christine>         2) Can I have "www.pectin" as name? I remember
    Christine> reading in an RFC that periods are used as delimiters
    Christine> but I can't remember the RFC number. This gets me out
    Christine> of having to create a subdomain pectin.jelly.com with
    Christine> one entry - www.

You can enter www.pectin.jelly.com in the zone file for jelly.com.
There's no requirement to delegate the pectin.jelly.com domain and set
up NS and SOA records for it.

    Christine>         3) My overzealous legal dept. has registered
    Christine> jelly.com, jelly.net and jelly.org.  If they had their
    Christine> ways we would also have jelly.mil, jelly.gov and
    Christine> jelly.edu.  My jelly.net and jelly.org zones are empty
    Christine> except for the SOA record.  I want to return hosts in
    Christine> jelly.com for querries about jelly.net and jelly.org.
    Christine> I don't want to write 5000 CNAME entries and keep them
    Christine> straight.  I want to do this at the DNS level with one
    Christine> fell swoop.  Can BIND8.2 accomodate this?

It can, but not the way you want. You have two options. One is to use
a script - 1 or 2 lines of awk will do the job - and churn out your
umpteen zone files containing all these the CNAMEs from the same
source file.  The second is to use the same zone file for all these
aliased domains and edit it whenever a change is made. For simplicity
I recommend the former approach: one zone, one zone file.