named-xfer and file order

[Barry Margolin]

In article <PCEIIOODPEIJJFAGCCEFKEIACMAA.jay at qtm.net>,
Network Admin [JPeterson] <jay at qtm.net> wrote:
>Wierd question .. I was on our ns2 box doing some checks and noticed that
>the reverse.db file for our class Cs are in a strange order, on ns1
>everything is in numerical order inside the $ORIGIN but on ns2 they are
>similar to as follows:
>27              IN      PTR     dial-sjwebcam.qtm.net.
>28              IN      PTR     router.cgi-bin.org.
>30              IN      PTR     enterprise.qtm.net.
>29              IN      PTR     tc19mgr.qtm.net.
>31              IN      PTR     defiant.qtm.net.
>32              IN      PTR     babylon.qtm.net.
>33              IN      PTR     iceman.qtm.net.
>note the order from 28 to 30 then back to 29 then to 31, it gets wierder but
>that was the shortest example I saw.  Does anyone have an idea of what
>causes this and/or if I can fix it? also we make comments prefixed by ; in
>the files on NS1 describing where these IPs are used and they don't seem to
>be transfering.

During zone transfers, records are transmitted in the order they appear in
named's memory.  Since order between names is not significant, named makes
no attempt to remember the order that the names appeared in the zone file
on the master, so the order on the slave will be apparently random.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.