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Re: AW: Odd policy question.

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Fri Jan 13 17:29:58 2006 
On 13-Jan-2006, at 17:07, Randy Bush wrote:




it is a best practice to separate authoritative and recursive
servers.



why?



Because it prevents stale, authoritative data on your nameservers
being returned to intermediate-mode resolvers in the form of
apparently authoritative answers, bypassing a valid delegation chain
from the root.



and thereby hiding the fact that someone has either lame delegated
or i have forgotten to remove an auth zone, both cases i want to
catch.  not a win here.




If someone has a lame delegation to one of your servers, that's a
different problem (and the one that this thread began with). The link
between that problem and the one I'm talking about is the decision to
treat the former with bogus data as an incentive for the lame
delegator to fix their records.



The impact of forgetting to remove a zone is greatly reduced if
nobody ever has a reason to send a query for that data to your
nameserver. To all intents and purposes, hosting random, non-
delegated zones on an authority-only server doesn't break anything.



However, it's still a good idea to check (e.g. using a script) for
forgotten zones, as you say, in the interests of good hygiene.





Joe