DNS forwarders

[Company, Paul J.]

Can someone explain forwarders to me.
I've read the O'Reilley book, and the archives and the man pages.
I really think I understand it, but it's not working the way I'm
interpreting the information.

The way I understand it is, if a query comes in and you're not
authoritative and you don't have the answer in your cache, then
the query is forwarded to the list of forwarders in the list.

--pjc

-----Original Message-----
From: Company, Paul J. [mailto:paul.company at unisys.com]
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 12:51 AM
To: bind-users at isc.org
Subject: DNS forwarders



I searched the archives and couldn't find an answer to my problem.
 
I'm running BIND 8.2.1
 
I want to delegate part of a class C address space (zone) to another
authoritative server under the same domain (plpt.com).
I don't want to subdomain. I just want all querys for a Class C address to
be forwarded to the second master server after
the first master server has a crack at it.
 
I don't want to change all the clients (mostly NT) DNS Search Orders (aka.,
/etc/resolv.conf on UNIX),
I'd like to use forwarders, but from what I've read:
    "Forwarding occurs only on those queries for which the server
     is not authoritative and does not have the answer in its cache."
 
Well, I know how to flush the cache (ndc restart), but I am authoritative
for the domain, so
forwarders doesn't work.
 
Is there a simple solution for what I want to do?
 
EXAMPLE:
 
HOST A: master for plpt.com (authoritative for this zone)
              zone file contains hosta1 IN A 192.168.0.1, hosta2 IN A
192.168.0.2
 
HOST B: master for plpt.com (authoritative for this zone)
              zone file contains hostb3 IN A 192.168.0.3, hostb4 192.168.0.4
 
HOST C: Regular client, with DNS search (/etc/resolv.conf) pointing to HOST
A.
 
If I nslookup hostb3 from HOST C, I want HOST A to forward this to HOST B
and get an answer.
 
Is this possible?
 
thanks, pjc