where does my master send the notify message?

[Michael Boehme]

Hello all,

we run one master and one slave nameserver using bind 8.2.3-0.
All domains are registered at the apropriate nic referencing to both
nameservers. When I update a zone-file on the master and issue a reload to
bind I can see in syslog that it sends out a notify. However the slave does
not see all notifies send by the master. So either the slave sees it and
issues the zone-transfer or the notifymessage does not even appear in the
slave´s syslog  and it just sits there doing nothing.

I wondered how that come and finally found a solution to my problem. If I
add "also-notify { ip-of-the-slave; };" to the masters bind configuration
file the slave will see 100% of all notifies the master sends.

As far as I understand the master is supposed to read the zone file of the
domain being updated and issue a notify message to all other nameservers
mentioned in that zone file exept to itself.
There are only 2 nameservers (the master and its slave) referenced in that
zone file so bind should be clever enough to pick the right one.

Am I mistaking on that its doing that automatically or should I have added
"also-notify" anyway?
Has anyone ever seen that before?

Thanks!!
Michael

P.S.: Is there any way to automate the zone-file the slave holds? If I setup
a  new domain I will have to add it to the masters zone file and even to the
slaves zone file to let it know that it should poll the zone from the
master.

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