On 2013-03-14, at 08:21, "R.P. Aditya" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I didn't mean to be opaque, but just in case it clarifies more:
> 
> The question is "does the benefit of quicker updates outweigh the risks
> involved in serving a few select zones authoritatively from a recursive
> server that is open to a select population?" 

Hosting authoritative zones on recursive servers is recommended for zones that 
are recognised as being for local use, e.g. see RFC 6303. There is nothing 
fundamentally broken with this idea.

What you're suggesting (if I read the inference correctly) is that your 
recursive servers are also acting as stealth slaves for particular zones that 
your user base cares about, zones that are not of only local significance in 
the 6303 sense.

The only risk I can think of that you might consider is that of troubleshooting 
in the future. You need to make sure that the stealth slaves are able to 
maintain up-to-date copies of those zones (i.e. that zone transfer is working) 
to avoid the confusing situation where clients of your recursive servers are 
seeing a different zone revision from the one published on the non-stealth 
authoritative servers (i.e. the servers that are cited in the delegation and 
apex NS sets).

For example, consider a situation where someone else in the organisation 
decides in the future to change the hosting of those zones, but is unaware of 
the stealth slave arrangement on the recursive servers. The zones might move 
and zone transfers of those zones might start to fail, and the result might 
very well be an apparently complex and mysterious situation that it is not 
immediately obvious how to debug.

You might consider whether it makes any practical difference to your users in 
terms of performance or stability for these zones to be served authoritatively 
by your caches or whether the caches actually cache answers from external 
authoritative servers depends. I won't presuppose an answer to that question, 
since it depends on an understanding of your particular circumstances and I 
don't think there's any useful general answer.

> I do realize that that is a determination for my organization to make,
> but if more of the risks were enumerated for non-open resolvers, it
> would be easier to weigh.

The operational concern above is all I can think of, if I've understood the 
question correctly.


Joe

_______________________________________________
dns-operations mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-operations
dns-jobs mailing list
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-jobs

Reply via email to