How to Specify a Slave Server

A slave server maintains a copy of the data for the zone. The master server sends its data and delegates authority to the slave server. Clients can query a slave server for DNS information. By using slave servers, you can improve response time and reduce network overhead by spreading the load over multiple machines. Slave servers also provide redundancy in case the master server is not available.

When in.named starts, it requests all the data for the given zone from the master. The slave server then periodically checks with the master to see if it needs to update its database. The process of sending the most recent zone database from the master to the slave is called a zone transfer. Thus, you do not modify data files on a slave server, you modify the data files on the zone's master server and the slave servers update their files from the master.

To specify that a server is to be the slave server for a given zone, you create slave records in that server's named.boot file. Separate records can designate the server as a slave server for the zone, the zone's reverse address domain, and the loopback host.

A slave record has three required fields:

• The first field designates the server as slave.

• The second field identifies the zone it serves.

• The third field identifies the IP address of the master server for the zone from which the slave server obtains its authoritative data.

A “slave” record can have one or more optional fields after the required fields. The optional fields are:

• slave servers

  After the IP address of the master server, you can add IP addresses of other slave servers. These provide additional sources from which the slave server can obtain data. Adding IP addresses of slave servers might, under some circumstances, reduce performance unless those IP addresses are additional network addresses of a multihome master server.

• Backup file

  After the IP address of the master (and optional slave) servers, you can add the name of a backup hosts file. If a backup file name is present, the slave server loads its data from that file, then checks with the master (and optional slave) servers to make sure that the data in the backup file is up to date. If the backup file is not up to date, it is brought up to date, based on the information received from the master server.

For example, the following lines in a boot file specify that the server is the slave server for the doc.com zone and its reverse address domain, that it obtains its authoritative data from the master server with an IP address of 172.16.0.1, that it uses the server 172.16.0.2 as a slave source of zone data, and initially loads its data from the file doc.com.bakup:

 
slave   doc.com   129.146.168.119  192.146.168.38  doc.com.bakup
slave   4.0.32.128.in-addr.arpa       129.146.168.119 

In the context of the various example files presented in this chapter, the sample boot file lines above correspond to the boot file of the dnsslave server, which is an alias for the sirius machine whose IP address is 192.146.168.38.

A server can act as the master server for one or more zones, and as the slave server for one or more zones. The mixture of entries in the boot file determines whether a server is a master or slave server for a given zone.