non-delegating NS records

[Bill Moseley]

Could someone clarify a few questions.  I have that feeling that I'm
missing something really, really obvious in my understanding of bind.

In a zone file what is the point of the NS records when not delegating to
another name server?

For example,

$ORIGIN hank.org.
@	IN NS  ns1.hank.org.
       IN NS  ns2.hank.org.
       IN NS  ns1.granitecanyon.com.


Say a request comes in to the bind running on ns1.hank.org:

- Bind already knows it's authoritative for the zone because of the
"master" or "slave" in named.conf.  So it doesn't need to see that ns1
(itself) is in its zone file.

- The requester (remote resolver) doesn't need to know the name of
ns1.hank.org as it already knows that (from the parent/root server) and is
currently talking to ns1.hank.org anyway.

- The requester doesn't really need to know that ns2.hank.org is also
authoritative for the zone because a) it should know that from the
parent/root delegation, and b) it is already talking to an authoritative
server (ns1) and therefore shouldn't need to talk to ns2.

The only feature I can think of is that those DNS entries allow Bind to
send NOTIFY notice to ns2.hank.org when there's a zone file change.  Or
maybe allow you to make other name servers available that aren't officially
delegated to in the parent server.

But neither of those are very good reason.  So clearly I'm missing something.

Thanks,




Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley at hank.org