thoughts on views and zone transfers

[Anne Bennett]

Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> had suggested:

> why not just dump all of the "view" ugliness in favor of multiple A 
> records and sortlists?

Yup, that works.  Many thanks (and also to Jim Reid, who suggested a
similar thing offline).


I had asked, in connection with this:

> why *would* a client ever get the wrong server, in this scenario
> (assuming I had configured the sortlists correctly)?

Anyone who's thinking of doing something like this (either with views
or sortlists) should be aware that if a Unix client has "NIS" for hosts
in the service switch file, all bets are off, because:

  - If the NIS server makes the DNS query instead of the client, it
    may get a "wrong" answer (the wrong view, or a list sorted in the
    wrong order, as the case may be).

  - On some operating systems at least, NIS can punt to another resolver
    instead of the resolv.conf resolvers on the NIS server.  This
    seems like a bug to us, but there's nothing we can do about it
    (aside of course from taking "nis" out of the "hosts" line in the
    client service switch files).

Anyway, thanks again.


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Sysadmin, ENCS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne at encs.concordia.ca                                    +1 514 848-2424 x2285