bad horizontal referral ?

[Jean-François Leroux]

Ok, I understand. Thanks for the explanation.

Now, here's my problem. I have two dns servers in a public zone (which
I'm testing), and when I issue a dig myzone.com @myserver1.myzone.com
(or myserver2) +nsserach +trace, I always get this message. Could it
be that there's a problem with my setup? As far as I understand bind,
it should be ok, the second one being slave of the first one. They're
on the same level though, since both are slaves of a single master in
the private zone. Is this a problem?


2008/3/12, Kevin Darcy <kcd at chrysler.com>:
> Jean-François Leroux wrote:
>  > Thanks for the explanation, Kevin. If I may ask, what means
>  > 'horizontal' in the message? I've had a look in my DNS & Bind book but
>  > couldn't find anything about it...
>  > And while I'm thinking of it, how can I know which server refers me to
>  > a wrong address? Is this possible ?
>  >
>  >
>  > 2008/3/12, Kevin Darcy <kcd at chrysler.com>:
>  >
>  >> Jean-François Leroux wrote:
>  >>  > Hi,
>  >>  > doing a trace with dig today I got a 'BAD (HORIZONTAL) REFERRAL'
>  >>  > message, with the correct answer though.
>  >>  >  What does this mean ?
>  >>  >
>  >>  >
>  >>  >
>  >>
>  >> Referrals should be "down" not "across". If you're resolving www.foo.com
>  >>  iteratively and along the way a delegated nameserver for foo.com refers
>  >>  you to blah.com, that's a useless referral because it doesn't get you
>  >>  any closer to resolving the name.
>  >>
>  >>  Dig probably got the correct answer because it gave up on the broken
>  >>  nameserver and tried a different one.
>  >>
>
> "Horizontal" means at the same level of the hierarchy. The DNS namespace
>  is often viewed as being tree-like, with the "root" at the top and each
>  level of subdomain extending downwards. If a referral is "across" rather
>  than "down", it's "horizontal" instead of "vertical".
>
>  So many prepositions, so little time...
>
>
>
>       - Kevin
>
>
>