Slave nameserver question

[Cherney John-CJC030]

You have all been very helpful in answering my crazy questions. It would
be wrong of me to leave you hanging. 

Barry, you're on the right track. After the nameserver comes up, it will
be told who the master is. In the meantime, though, while it is coming
up, it must be a slave, so it has to have a masters line. Putting an
unreachable address there didn't seem like a good idea. Putting its own
IP address seems like it should work, but I didn't know if there was
something in the RFCs that disallowed that, or something in the code
that would protect itself from a situation like that. 

Kevin, thank you for testing that. I wasn't going to get a chance to
test that until next week sometime. I will take an extra long coffee
break next week in your honor. If you start to get the jitters next
Wednesday afternoon, that will be why. :)

Thanks!
jwc

-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users-bounce at isc.org [mailto:bind-users-bounce at isc.org] On
Behalf Of Barry Margolin
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 10:50 PM
To: comp-protocols-dns-bind at moderators.individual.net
Subject: Re: Slave nameserver question

In article <gc1c35$24e2$1 at sf1.isc.org>, Kevin Darcy <kcd at chrysler.com>
wrote:

> Barry Margolin wrote:
> > In article <gc0udg$1k6p$1 at sf1.isc.org>, Kevin Darcy 
> > <kcd at chrysler.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> Cherney John-CJC030 wrote:
> >>     
> >>> Besides being a bad idea from a general design perspective, is it 
> >>> possible to set up a nameserver as a slave for a domain, but have 
> >>> the masters field point to itself? ("I am a slave for this 
> >>> information, and the master is myself.") In thinking about it, it 
> >>> seems like it should be OK. The slave will always be able to 
> >>> contact the master, so the data should never go stale. The serial 
> >>> number is always up to date, so there won't be any bandwidth used 
> >>> in zone transfers. Is there something somewhere that would make 
> >>> this not work? (Something in the code for executing refreshes or 
> >>> parsing the named.conf file?)
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> Easy enough to test...
> >>
> >> (Tick tock, tick tock...)
> >>
> >> Yeah, it works.
> >>
> >> But... why? Just define it as a master.
> >>     
> >
> > Maybe what he's really planning on doing is listing two masters: the

> > real master and itself.  Pointing to the real master causes updates 
> > to propagate, pointing to itself prevents expiration.
> >   
> "the master", singular.
> 
> "... there won't be any bandwidth used in zone transfers".
> 
> Seems like he's setting up a master zone, but for whatever reason 
> wants to call it a slave.

For the purposes of his question, he was only asking about this master.

That doesn't mean he doesn't plan to do something different in actual
practice.

Well, maybe he'll come back and tell us.

--
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***