On Mon, 02 Apr 2001, you wrote:
> > if its a box-over-in-the corner that one day will be your DNS server
> > somewhere but right now its just a ip address on a network you're trying
> > to test before deploying .. it did get a name eventually.
>
> Hmmm.. I don't quite know how you can *test* it, if it hasn't got any
> names, and therefore can't serve any zones...
now tell me .. why cant I have a nameserver stuffed full of zone files
sitting in a corner, and want to test that it really beleives it can
serve those zones before I install it somewhere .. it doesn;t *need* a
name for that, its task is to serve up authoratative info innit... its
only nslookup that htinks it needs a name.
> > and .. surely not all the nameservers are necessarily named, only the ones
> > published to the world, you could have internal servers that don;t answer
> > external queries (such as a primary master server with two slaves used as
> > authoratative servers to the world, whilst your primary master is left
> > untroubled) in which case the primary master would not need a name just
> > an address, and you might want to query it directly yourself to make sure
> > it was not telling porkies. ??
>
> *burble*! It is reasonable to have this property, yes, but then what do
> you put in the host part of the SOA record for the zones served by this.
> The entry there should be the master server for the zone.
its quite common to run a the real primary master server inside an
internal network (where it may or may not be named) and put the name of
one of the public facing machine(s) in the SOA .. there is no way of
telling whther the public facing machine got its info from a zone
transfer or a zonefile as far as I can tell ...
> The other case
> that you might want this is for a resolver, however again, the small
> amount of work involved in assigning a name for the machine in question
> suggests that you get no added benefit by *not* doing so.
[thinks: .. hmm theres something about 'recursive queries' that keeps
waving at me .. but I cant quite remember what it is ..]
agreed .. there is no benefit to be had by not doing so. in general
everyhting gets named eventually .. but the original question was 'how
can it serve names if it doesnt have a name itself' which is a subtly
different question :)
--
Robin Szemeti
The box said "requires windows 95 or better"
So I installed Linux!
