Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1999 09:57:37 -0400 From: Mitch Collinsworth <mkc@Graphics.Cornell.EDU> To: "Shawn Ramsey" <shawn@megadeth.org> Cc: "Ronald Klop" <ronald@cs.vu.nl>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: DNS secondary zone Message-ID: <199908041357.AA065825058@broccoli.graphics.cornell.edu> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 04 Aug 1999 01:29:20 PDT." <003b01bede53$72f08610$f957d8c0@cpl.net>
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>> Hello, >> >> What is the purpose of a secondary DNS? >> Is it just a backup copy of the primary or is it for a subdomain of a >> domain? Or for something totally different? >> Can somebody explain this to me or point me to a document with a good >> description of this? > >A secondary merely pulls it data from a primary name server. A name server >doing "secondary" can be a primary server, it just gets its data from >another server. Secondary servers are usually backup servers, pulling the >data from the primary. What's missing from this description is that secondary authoritative servers are also very important for redundancy. If your zone has only one authoritative server and it is down or unreachable, suddenly your zone no longer exists. Good engineering practice (which is becoming rare in the ISP age) is to have multiple authoritative servers topologically separated on the net. Subdomains can be part of the parent zone or can be a new zone delegated to a different list of authoritative servers. This is a distinct issue from primary/secondary. The book to get you up to speed on DNS is O'Reilly's (ora.com) DNS and Bind, 3rd edition by Albitz and Liu. -Mitch To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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