Some hints on DNS config?

[Kevin Darcy]

Kimi Ostro wrote:

>Hello list,
>
>I have been playing around with BIND for sometime now and have a
>"nice" caching/forwarder + authorative nameserver setup, hence you can
>probably see my problem?
>
>So now that I have some spare time, I want/need to spit this up to
>something like:
>
> {Caching-Forwarder}
>      \      /
> {Master}   /
>    |   \  /
>    | {Slave}
>    |
> {DHCP-Server}
>
>My idea being that all the clients contact the slave for all/most of
>the name resolution. One thing to mix this a little further, will be
>Dynamic-DNS coming from my DHCP server which I guess should modify
>certain records on the master.
>
>I was reading http://www.isc.org/pubs/tn/isc-tn-2002-2.html and was a
>little stumped on:
>
>* "Your named.conf file should contain a hint for the root zone, a
>master zone for 0.0.127.IN-ADDR.ARPA, as well as master zones for any
>private..."
>
>I don't quite get the reasoning behind this?
>
What part don't you get? The "hints" file is required by an iterative 
resolver for root-zone information (it needs to know, at a minimum, 
about the root zone, if it is to have any hope of following the 
delgations down from there to resolve other names). The 
0.0.127.in-addr.arpa zone (or 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa or other variants) 
is not strictly necessary, but a nice convenience so that the box can 
resolve its own loopback address to something reasonable.

                                                                         
                                             - Kevin