Reconfiguring a Slave Zone

Re: Reconfiguring a Slave Zone

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At 11:22 AM -0700 5/21/02, Warren Michelsen wrote:
>Using Manager 3.5.1 running on classic OS, trying to change a slave zone setup on one of my QuickDNS servers (also on classic).
>
>When I select the zone and click Options, I'm told that there are no user configurable options for this zone on this server. What I need to do is change which server this zone should be transferred from. How do I configure that?
>
>In the dialog telling me there are no configurable options, what is the purpose of the pop-up menu listing my DNS servers? Selecting one does not seem to make a difference anywhere.

This turned out to be a confusing user interface. I'll explain.

I had three QuickDNS servers running. ns0 and ns1 were both masters for all of my zones and ns2 was a slave. It was for ns2 that I was trying to make changes. I wanted to make my slave zones on ns2 get transfers from ns1 instead of ns0. With me so far?

The key to understanding my confusion is that in QuickDNS Manager, I was in SERVER VIEW, not Zone View. That is, each of my three servers were listed and each showed the zone in question, which on the first two servers was a master and on the 3rd server, ns2, it was a slave zone.

Since the zone entry I selected was the one listed under ns2, the server on which that zone is a slave, I naturally expected the options shown (when I clicked the Options button) to be those of the zone ON THE ns2 SERVER, the one from which I had selected the zone. Instead, the dialog opened informing me that there were no configurable options for that zone on "this server", which SHOULD HAVE BEEN ns2 but was not. (But I didn't know that.)

I didn't know what to make of the pop-up selector with ns0, ns1 and ns2 on it. I did not realize that it was showing me which server's options I was seeing. I thought maybe it was giving me a list of servers to get the zone from for transfer to ns2, the server whose Options I thought I was changing. I tried selecting ns1 (the default was ns0) and nothing changed -- still no configurable options. Unfortunately, since I thought that the pop-up was for selecting which server to get transfers from, I didn't try selecting ns2 (It would make no sense to get zone transfers for ns2 from ns2, would it?) and was afraid I might break something. So I gave up and posted my question to the list.

This IS a user interface issue. I had every reason to believe that selecting the zone from the listing shown under ns2 and then clicking Options would present me the options for that zone ON NS2. After all, that's how things work otherwise.

For example, in Server View, select a zone that is a slave zone for that server. Double-click to open it. Sort it, delete records, make any changes you like. Nothing happens, the save button is never enabled because you are messing with a slave zone.

Now double-click the same zone (Server View) on a server where it's a master zone. The first time you make a change, the save button is enabled as the zone is "dirty" and needs to be saved.

See? when a zone is selected in Server View, it matters which server the zone is selected from. Except when looking at zone options.

Since I'd selected my zone from ns2, the pop-up should have been showing ns2 (and ns2's options for that zone) when the the Options dialog opened.

Anyway, that's why there was probably a big, collective "DUH!" when I posted my question...

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