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0 pointscanadian_tired5y ago0 comments

FWIW, I used primary/secondary for years too. Once BIND 8 showed up, I think they switched to master/slave as it better described the process... to the uninitiated, "secondary" was probably viewed as a "backup" in the sensse of DR/HA.

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darrenf5y ago

Interesting. I haven't touched BIND for years and am out of the loop, plus memory is fallible anyway. Just looked at it and have ended up at RFC 8499 from January 2019: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8499

   Master server:  See "Primary server".

   Primary server:  "Any authoritative server configured to be the
      source of zone transfer for one or more [secondary] servers."
      (Quoted from [RFC1996], Section 2.1) Or, more specifically,
      [RFC2136] calls it "an authoritative server configured to be the
      source of AXFR or IXFR data for one or more [secondary] servers".
      Primary servers are also discussed in [RFC1034].  Although early
      DNS RFCs such as [RFC1996] referred to this as a "master", the
      current common usage has shifted to "primary".

So it seems `primary` is essentially the official term in DNS, but `master` may well be the preferred term by BIND itself.

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