Slightly OT: BIND problem

[Scott Mitchell]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 11:23:16PM +0000, Paul Civati wrote:
> > named.conf makes it primary for 10.1/16.  I *thought* that should
> > allow me to delegate the various 10.1.x/24 ranges to another server
> 
> Yes, you should be able to do this, and you're delegation looks
> correct.  You'll have to do some lookups with host and dig to
> find out why it's not seeing the NT delegated zone.

I think I've figured this out, finally.  The named.conf also contains a
'forwarders' line, pointing to three of PSINet's caching servers.  It
appears that the forwarders are queried first on any query that the server
isn't authoritative for and doesn't have cached itself.  It further appears
that my server doesn't consider itself to be authoritative for the
delegated 10.1.x/24 subdomains (makes sense), so passes it on to PSINet,
who clearly can't do much with it... another failed lookup :-(

So I can hopefuly fix the problem by turning off forwarding on the
1.10.in-addr.arpa zone.  This works on a little test server I put together
on a FreeBSD box; I haven't got it up on the main OpenBSD servers yet.

However, this strikes me as intuitively the wrong behaviour -- the server
may not be authoritative for the subdomain, but it did the delegation, so
it knows d*** well who *is* the authority... why bother asking some
upstream cache that very likely has no idea?

The BIND docs tell me that forwarding is good, because it allows large
caches to be built up and cuts down on traffic to the root servers.  I'm
tempted to turn it off though, to work around this particular oddity.

Anyway, enough freebsd-users bandwidth wasted on this topic.  I'll take any
further rantings to the DNS newsgroups :-)

Thanks Paul for all your help!

Cheers,

	Scott

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