[Dnsmasq-discuss] how to set NS for a zone?

[Carlos Carvalho]

richardvoigt at gmail.com (richardvoigt at gmail.com) wrote on 4 March 2011 11:55:
 >
 >
 >On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Carlos Carvalho <carlos at fisica.ufpr.br> wrote:
 >
 >    richardvoigt at gmail.com (richardvoigt at gmail.com) wrote on 4 March 2011
 >    10:15:
 >     >That prevents it from running as a parent zone. As Carlos has said, the
 >    parent
 >     >zone needs to provide the NS record for subzones, otherwise there would
 >    be no
 >     >way to know which server to query for the NS record in the first place.
 >
 >    Exactly. The SOA record is not necessary normally. And one shouldn't
 >    use that ugliness of zone transfer via dns protocol. So dnsmasq has
 >    enough support (ptr, ttl, mx) for being authoritative. One cannot set
 >    ttl for each record but this is rarely necessary. It even works
 >    without ns, it's just inelegant to have no answer when asking to the
 >    machine responsible for the zone.
 >
 >
 >While dnsmasq doesn't generate NS records, I should think it would forward the
 >query to the upstream nameserver, which would recurse and eventually get it
 >from the nameserver for the parent zone.

For dnsmasq to be authoritative it has to answer queries about the
zone by itself, without querying anybody else; if an entry isn't known
to the authoritative server it means it doesn't exist. So dnsmasq must
have local=/the.zone/ in the config. Therefore it won't send queries
to other servers about it.

Also, another server would reach the parent but might as well check
the indicated authoritative zone server for good measure, and would
get from it the answer that it doesn't exist(?!)...