delegation with multiple NS including localhost

Sylvain Bertrand Sylvain.Bertrand at
Thu Jan 8 10:59:32 UTC 2004

Hi everyone,

Let's say I own, and I want to delegate the handling of the zone to

My /var/named/ (on would look like this:

#------- CUT HERE -------
foo          NS   A 
foo          NS

As you can see, I've delegated foo to both and, which is localhost.

I've seen on this ML's archives that bind would choose the fastest of 
the two NS records for foo, and forward the request. In this case, is obviously the fastest since it is localhost. How do things 
work from here? Does bind go into a non-ending recursion? Is the request 
terminated (immediately or not?) and sent to the other NS record 

I know it seems a little bit odd to delegate to yourself, but I've seen 
(by typing "host -l") this case on a server which delegation to a 
subzone doesn't work well, and I was wondering if these kind of records 
could lead to errors of type 3 (NXDOMAIN), which occur from time to time 
on this server.

If you guys have an answer, I'd be pleased to hear it!

(first message on this ML ;-))

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