slave zone without "file" statement?

[andrew kagan]

>>Hi All: I just brought a new 9.6.0 slave server online on freebsd 7. In
>>my configuration file, I added all the zones with a configuration like:
>>
>>zone "myzone" IN { type slave; masters {xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx}; };
>>
>>note that I left out the "file" statement.
>>
>>When I reload BIND  I see the zones being loaded from the master, and my 
>>query log shows the server answering queries...everything looks OK, but 
>>I don't see any backup files being created anywhere.
> 
> How would it know where to put them?
> 
>>Is BIND just loading the zone data into RAM? 
> 
> Yes. There is no difference from previous versions of BIND here.
> 
>>                                             Is this a really bad idea?
> 
> Yes. Every time the slave nameserver is restarted it will have to fetch
> the zones from the master again, and if the master is down at the time,
> it will not be able to answer queries about them until it comes back.
> 
> In fact, it's such a bad idea that I'm not really sure why BIND continues
> to allow omitting "file" for a type slave (or stub) zone, or at least why
> it doesn't issue a big fat warning about about it.

LOL... I only needed to update 100 zones...