What is Authorative Data and Authorative Name Server

[Kevin Darcy]

A nameserver is "authoritative" for a zone if it has a full copy of the zone
at all times and announces its authoritativeness by setting the
AA (Authoritative Answer) in responses it gives for names in the zone. In
BIND terms, this means a server which is configured as "type master" or
"type slave", where, in the case of a master, the zone loaded properly from
the zone file, and, in the case of a slave, the zone has been replicated at
least once and has not expired.

"Authoritative data" is just the collection of records in a zone for which a
nameserver is authoritative.

You could make your nameserver authoritative for locallots.com by
configuring it as master or slave for that zone. However, unless you have
actually been *delegated* that domain, or your nameservers are listed in the
zone's NS records, no-one is going to know to query your servers for that
domain unless they are explicitly configured to do so. So the fact that you
are "authoritative" for a zone is a necessary, but not a
*sufficient* condition for actually having effective control over the zone's
contents. Is your server ns1.sohospecialists.com or ns2.sohospecialists.com?
Those are the delegated servers for locallots.com.


- Kevin

Daniel Pacheco II wrote:

> Hey Guys do yall know the following meanings, I'm just setup a Linux DNS
> Server running Bind 8 and I need to know what Authorative Data and
> Authorative Name Server are and how I can setup them up on the server for
> the following domain locallots.com
>
> Regards,
>
> Daniel