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Domain DNS Zone - Master vs. Slave

R

Rocky@

Guest
I was creating a domain template in Plesk, and came across an item in DNS asking "Type of Damin DNS zone" with a choice of master or slave.

What is this for and how it works for individual domains? I read the documentation and didn't really get it. For now I leave it as master. In what condition I should set it to slave?

Sam
 
Each domain name needs a miniumum of two nameservers (DNS servers).

Normally you have one master, and one slave.

A slave namsever looks at the records on the master nameserver and copies them. This changes to the DNS records that happen on the master namsever are automatically propagated to the slave.

On a server running Plesk, the same server will also be the master namesever, since Plesk automatically adds DNS records to bind for domains you add via your control panel.

If, on the other hand, you had a separate server doing the DNS for a domain (which might be the case ocaasionally) then you'd set up the domain as a slave rather than a master.

I hope this helps -- slightly :)

Faris.
 
So slave DNS is another term for the secondary DNS?

Am I right?

Thanks for the explanation.

Sam
 
Yes, you can look at it that way. Generally you would have 2 name servers for a domain. Normally one would be a 'Master', the other one a 'Slave', but you could have 2 Masters if you wanted. You always need to have at least one Master name server.

A slave server is one which will be updated from the 'Master' on a regular basis.

You would make changes to the Master DNS server, and the 2nd, 3rd, etc. would retrieve the changes from the Master. (up to 7 by RFC if I'm not mistaken), although I don't know of too many people who do more than 3 at most.

If you were to have multiple Master's for a domain, then any changes made to the domain would then also have to be made (manually) to the other servers.

Sometimes it can be tricky getting a 'Slave' server to update from a Plesk server, even tiny differences in the Bind/Named config from one server to another can be enough to cause chaos.

If you are using more than one DNS server for domains (as you should), do regular checks with sites such as DNSReports.com to see if anything is not working properly.
 
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