Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 3 71
Configuring and Administering the BIND Name Service
Choosing Name Servers for Your Domain
Choosing Name Servers for Your
Domain
You can configure your host as any of three types of BIND name servers:
Primary Master
Server A primary master server is the authority for its domain
and contains all data corresponding to its domain. It
reads its information from a master file on disk.
Secondary
Master Server A secondary is also the authority for its domain and
contains that domain’s data, but it gets its data over
the network from another master server.
Caching-Only
Server A caching-only server is not authoritative for any
domain. It gets its data from an authoritative server
and places it in its cache.
If you do not want to run a name server at all on your host, you can
configure the resolver to query a name server on another host. By
default, the resolver is configured to query the name server on the local
host.
To Choose the Type of Name Server to Run
No strict rules exist to determine which server configuration should be
used on each host. Following are some suggestions for configuration:
• Timeshare machines or cluster servers should be primary or
secondary servers.
• If you want the benefits of a name server but do not want to maintain
authoritative data, you may want to set up a caching-only server.
Running a caching-only server gives you better performance than
querying a name server on a remote system, especially if the remote
system is on the other side of a gateway or router.
• PCs, workstations that do not want to maintain a server, and other
small networked systems should be configured to query a name
server on another host. Cluster nodes should query the name server
on the cluster server.