Forward Zone Question

[Kevin Darcy]

Michael Colterman wrote:

> I am relatively new to BIND.  My question is in regards to forward zones.
>
> What happens when you don't specify an IP in the forwarders section.
>
> ie.
>
> ....
> type forward;
> forward only;
> forwarders { ; };
> ...
>
> What would the purpose of this be, what would be gained by doing this? Is
> this an error?

If you have forwarding in effect globally (in the options statement), or for
an ancestor of the zone in question, then "forwarders { }" can be used to
turn off forwarding for that particular part of the hierarchy. This is
especially useful in split DNS configurations, where you might wish to
configure an internal server to forward Internet queries but not for
internal domains. Sure, you can accomplish roughly the same thing by
selectively forwarding those domains to internal servers, but forwarding is
generally ugly and you want to do as little of it as possible. You can just
be a slave for the apex zone(s) of your internal domain(s), e.g. foo.com,
or, if you want to be even more lightweight, or the internal servers don't
allow zone transfers, you could be just a "stub" of the zone(s). The
"forwarders { }" construct then relieves you of the burden of having to also
define all of the subzones as slave or stub.


- Kevin