Creating a New Slave Zone

A secondary DNS server, also sometimes referred to as a slave server, for a zone gets the zone data from another DNS server that is authoritative for the zone, called its master server. When a secondary name server starts up, it contacts its master server and requests a copy of the zone data for which it is responsible. This is called a zone transfer.

A slave server will backup your master server. This is mostly for redundancy if your master server is not running or is unavailable to answer a query. This section has everything necessary to create one.

• [NOTE:]You must configure the master server to allow this new slave server to perform zone transfers from the master server. These changes must be made on the master server. Information pertaining to this can be found in Section Edit Master Zone Tool - Edit a Master Zone.

The options on this screen are the same as setting up a master server. Find the detailed information in the previous section.

However, there is one new category, Master Servers.

Master servers

In the master servers section you can list all the master servers that this slave server will obtain its DNS information from. At least one master server is required in this section.

• [NOTE:]You are required to list your slave server as a name server on your master server. You can find information on doing this in the Name Server Section Tool - Name Server.

To finish creating a new slave zone you will need to define a mail route to backup. Defining a mail route must be done from the master server. You will need either the Fully-Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) or IP address of the slave server that will be handling the mail route. Information on configuring this on your master server can be found Tool - Mail Server.