DNS question

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, at 2:44pm, pll at lanminds.com wrote:
> I'm drawing a blank here.  For a slave DNS server, what should the 
> resolve.conf file look like?  Should the 'nameserver' line point to 
> itself or to the master server?

  The two are basically unrelated.

  ISC BIND's named ignores the client resolver library and the resolv.conf
file completely; anything it needs to know, it gets from named.conf, or uses
its own, internal resolver.  So the master vs slave distinction does not
have any bearing on the resolv.conf file.

  resolv.conf is used by the client resolver library, which in turn is used
by the rest of the system when they need to resolve names.  You should list
the standard caching, resolving nameservers you would list on any host
there.

  If your nameservers are caching resolvers, you will likely want to list
*all* your nameservers in the resolv.conf file, so that if the local named
is offline for some reason you can still resolve names.  If the two
nameservers are geographically separated, you might even have different
nameservers listed in each host's resolv.conf file.  If your nameservers
have recursion disabled (i.e., they are dedicated, non-recursive domain name
hosts), you would list whatever caching resolvers you would normally use
(which might be yours, or your ISP's).

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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