What entries?

[Kevin Darcy]

Saqib Mustafa wrote:

> The domain name server of www.lums.edu.pk has abaseen.lums.edu.pk as
> the nameserver with Bind 4 installed on it. We have made our own
> domain inside it, with domain name ms44.lums.edu.pk.

(I assume you mean that abaseen.lums.edu.pk is the nameserver for lums.edu.pk
and that ms44.lums.edu.pk is a delegated subzone).

> Name server is
> ms44.ms44.lums.edu.pk. This name server has Bind 8 installed on it.
>
> Now inside ms44.lums.edu.pk, we have three mirror site with CNAME as
> tango.ms44.lums.edu.pk. THese are
>
> -jango.ms44.lums.edu.pk,
> -mango.ms44.lums.edu.pk,
> -shango.ms44.lums.edu.pk,

What do you mean by "mirror site with CNAME"? Please don't tell me that
you've enabled the "multiple-cnames" option and are using an *illegal* and
not-recommended "feature" of BIND to do load-balancing. The "proper" way --
assuming you don't need true *dynamic* load-balancing with fine granularity
-- is just to have multiple A records for tango.ms44.lums.edu.pk.

> The problem is that I want that each time a query come to
> abaseen.lums.edu.pk for tango.ms44.lums.edu.pk, it should send it to
> ms44.ms44.lums.edu.pk as that has the CNAME records for
> tango.ms44.lums.edu.pk.

There's no way to force named to *always* forward queries for a particular
name. The closest you could come to that would be to set up selective
forwarding and reduce the TTL to 0. But that would only work for recursive
queries; non-recursive queries would only be answered from
abaseen.lums.edu.pk's authoritative data, i.e. either an answer, if it's a
slave for the zone, otherwise a referral to ms44.ms44.lums.edu.pk.

Why is it important that abaseen.lums.edu.pk forward the queries? Isn't it
sufficient for ms44.ms44.lums.edu.pk to just *receive* the queries from
whomever asks about the zone? This will happen with the normal referral
mechanism.


- Kevin