Hidden Master

[Cricket Liu]

> The only criteria that determines whether a DNS server is authorative
> for a zone or not is whether it has data about the zone itself, that
> is, not obtained from any other source (except, in the case of a slave
> server, from the master).
> 
> The SOA has nothing to do with that. As people have pointed out
> numerous times throughout the time I've been reading this
> newsgroup/mailing list, the SOA MNAME is only used for Dynamic
> Updates (and even then sending to the name servers mentioned in the NS
> records is an option).

Well, the SOA record has something to do with that:  Each zone must
have at least one SOA record, with the correct number of RDATA fields
in the right format.  A name server that tries to load a zone without
an SOA record, with more than one, or with an SOA record that doesn't
have the right format won't load the zone.  But the contents of the
MNAME field certainly has nothing to do with any of that--except in
the notorious BIND 8.1.

cricket

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