4.4BSD/usr/src/contrib/bind-4.9/contrib/misc/made-easy-2

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From: mads@edb.tih.no (Mads Eilertsen)
Subject: Re: DNS Made Easy (Well that was the plan anyway)
Message-ID: <1993May13.201037.12163@edb.tih.no>
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Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 20:10:37 GMT
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Craig Richmond - division (craig@ecel.uwa.edu.au) wrote:
: Being authoritive means that if a server is asked about something in that
: domain, it can say with no ambiguity whether or not a given piece of
: information is true.


The fine document should probably say something about zones.

To be precise, name servers are authoritative for zones, not domains.
The server beeing authoritative for the au -zone- is probably not
authoritative for all the data in the entire au domain name space.
It's authoritative only for the parts of the au name space that isn't
delegated to other servers. Those remaining contiguous parts comprises
the au -zone-.
See the nutshell book "DNS and BIND", Chap. 2, "Name Servers".


: My local machine knows about all the name server information, but no other
: sites know about me?

: Find an upstream nameserver (one that has an SOA for something in your
: domain) and ask them to be a secondary name server for you.  eg if you are
: ecel.uwa.edu.au, ask someone who has an SOA for the domain uwa.edu.au.

And also make sure their server actually delegates authority for
ecel.uwa.edu.au to your server.  Just putting up a secondary name server
ain't sufficient.  For "outside" sites to reach your domain information,
the upstream server must delegate authority to your server for your zones.

[...] when you are allocated a B class subnet for example, you get all of
: the IP numbers in the domain 130.95.

Similarly, you should make sure that the name server authoritative for
the 95.in-addr.arpa zone delegates authority for 130.95.in-addr.arpa
to your name server.  Or else reverse lookups won't work for the
outside world.

I believe delegation is an important feature of DNS and probably
ought to be mentioned in your document in some way.


Mads E. Eilertsen   
Trondheim College of Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science, Norway