On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 06:20:23PM +1200, Geoff Thompson wrote:
In an SOA record for a domain, the 'primary' or 'master' nameserver is listed, next to the admin email address for the domain.
There is some confusion in nomenclature here. RFC1033 says: SOA (Start Of Authority) <name> [<ttl>] [<class>] SOA <origin> <person> ( <serial> <refresh> <retry> <expire> <minimum> ) The Start Of Authority record designates the start of a zone. The zone ends at the next SOA record. <name> is the name of the zone. <origin> is the name of the host on which the master zone file resides. RFC1033 does not refer to "master nameservers", but a "master zone file". The terms "primary", "secondary", "master" and "slave" are (afaik) BIND- specific terms and are concerned with the manner in which authoritative zone data is obtained for a particular nameserver. A "master" or "primary" nameserver obtains authoritative zone data from a file, a "slave"/"secondary" performs a zone transfer from one of a set of "master" nameservers. Of all the nameservers that are authoritative for a zone, at least one of them will be a "master" in the BIND sense. All of them might be masters. Some of them might be slaves. However, as far as the DNS is concerned, the manner in which authoritative zone data arrives at authoritative nameservers is irrelevant.
I'm not sure if the primary server field is just informational or actually used by the nameserver, but it used to be checked by the old registry system, and also indicated to ns1.waikato.ac.nz as to where to zone-transfer a zone file from.
I think it's informational, as you have probably gathered :) I am quite possibly wrong on that point, of course :)
If someone want to setup a shadow primary, and have only the secondaries listed, I guess they have to list one of their secondary servers in the SOA record instead, and not let the registry know of their primary server.
I don't think so. I don't think there's a requirement to have the origin host (as specified in the SOA) listed in an NS record for the zone. Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog