Can I be a parent for a zone and a slave for a subdomain?

[Michele Chubirka]

I've recently taken over the VERY large task of repairing our zone and
upgrading our name server to Bind 8 from 4.97. I'm relatively new to
DNS/Bind, but I've been closely studying this list and the O'Reilly Bind
book.
We have a class B subnet and administer a large domain with many subdomains.
What I'm really confused about is that (according to the book and the
representatives from ISPs I've spoken to) I understood that if I delegated a
subdomain, I only maintained pointers to those domains by including their
nameservers in my db files for said subdomains.
I have a master and secondary nameserver upon which I make changes/updates.
But after closely studying the files and speaking to the administrator for
one of our subdomains, she indicates that she makes entries for her domains
and then transfers her zone to my primary nameserver. Is this correct?! How
can I be a Primary for the parent domain and a secondary for one of my
subdomains? Wouldn't I have to have two configuration files? Or one
indicating that I was primary for the parent zone, but secondary for the
subdomain/child?
When I look in the configuration file for our zone, the subdomain's
nameservers are listed as secondary name servers for my domain, BUT THEY'RE
MAKING ENTRIES for the subdomains! If they're secondaries, how can they make
entries and be SOA for their subdomains?

Michele Chubirka
Systems Administrator
George Washington University
202-994-5791
----- Original Message -----
From: "beetle bailey" <mrking01 at hotmail.com>
To: <bind-users at isc.org>
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2000 8:24 PM
Subject: ?'s about forwarders


>
> First I'd like to apologize for not providing any specifics, but this is
all
> info that's only available internally so I'm afraid it wouldn't help
anyway.
>   I hope it's not too confusing.
>
> Is there any reason a forward-only nameserver won't respond to a query for
a
> zone that it is a slave for with info from one of it's db files?  We have
2
> servers, both forward-only and both slaves for this particular domain but
> they give out different mx records.  Also, they both give out the same soa
> record which is not the master of the zone listed in their named.conf
files
> but rather the first forwarder listed there.  One server gives out the mx
> records listed in the db file that should have come from the master for
the
> zone and the other gives out the mx records from the forwarder (which are
> the mail servers available to the rest of the internet but not our
internal
> network -- hence the initial problem).  I would have thought the soa
record
> for the zone we're a slave for would come from the db file listed in
> named.conf but it seems to come from the forwarder even though mx records
> seem to come on one server from the local db file and the other from the
> forwarder.  Can someone explain why that is?  On top of this, it turns out
> the administrator that called me (who belongs to another subdomain that
> controls their own nameservers) with the initial report of undeliverable
> mail is forwarding all requests other than their own domain to our servers
> which are slaves for all of the internal domains but are also set up as
> forwarders themselves.  DNS & BIND cautions against this, though I have to
> admit I don't understand why.  I'd appreciate whatever  info you can give
> me.  Thanks.
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