Help with forwarders

[Kevin Darcy]

Since you have defined bluetiger.com as a master zone in your nameserver, it
believes that it has full knowledge of the bluetiger.com zone. Therefore,
it'll never forward any queries with names in that zone to any other
nameserver -- why ask anyone else about the zone? If you want bluetiger.com
names to be visible on this server, they need to go into the master zone
file, possibly duplicating what is available from your ISP's nameservers.

Or, if the *only* difference between your version of bluetiger.com and your
ISP's is that those external entries exist in the ISP version and not yours,
define your nameserver as a slave for that zone. Although I suspect that the
reason you defined bluetiger.com as master on your nameserver in the first
place is because you have "private" entries in the zone that aren't supposed
to be viewable by external clients. In that case, becoming a slave is not an
option.

In the long run, you'll probably want to run both the internal and external
DNS yourself, possibly on the same box (your ISP could then slave from you).
Then you could use BIND 9's "view" mechanism to serve different versions of
the zone to internal versus external clients. (You can do this in BIND 8 too,
but it requires configuring multiple interfaces on the box and running a
different nameserver instance on each relevant interface. Yuck).

- Kevin

Steve Best wrote:

> I have setup bind-8.2.23p1 on a box running Red Hat 7.0.  This is a
> DNS I have setup for out internal use, and so far has worked
> correctly.  However, our email is offsite, as is our DNS, both of which
> are hosted by XO.  I would like to have any queries for any addresses
> hosted by XO's DNS servers to be served up by my internal DNS, especially
> for smtp and pop3 requests.  I tried setting up a forwarders entry in
> named.conf, and I still get an error when trying to do a lookup on
> smtp and pop3.  This is also interferrng with our Bugzilla setup, since it
> cannot email users their passwords after account creation.
>
> Heres my named.conf:
>
> options {
>         directory "/var/named";
>         forwarders {
>                 207.155.183.72;
>         };
> };
>
> zone "bluetiger.com" in {
>         type master;
>         file "db.bluetiger.com";
> };
>
> zone "0.168.192.in-addr.arpa" in {
>         type master;
>         file "db.192.168.0";
> };
>
> zone "." in {
>         type hint;
>         file "named.root";
> };
>
> zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" in {
>         type master;
>         file "db.127.0.0";
> };
>
> I also tried putting the forwarders entry in the db.bluetiger.com zone
> entry, without success.  I am not even sure if forwarders will do what I
> want.
>
> Steve