Most changes to the /etc/named.conf file of a master or slave nameserver involves adding, modifying, or deleting zone statements. While these zone statements can contain many options, most nameservers require only a small subset to function efficiently. The following zone statements are very basic examples illustrating a master-slave nameserver relationship.

The following is an example of a zone statement for the primary nameserver hosting example.com (192.168.0.1):

zone "example.com" IN { type master; file "example.com.zone"; allow-update { none; }; };

In the statement, the zone is identified as example.com, the type is set to master, and the named service is instructed to read the /var/named/example.com.zone file. It also tells named not to allow any other hosts to update.

A slave server's zone statement for example.com is slightly different from the previous example. For a slave server, the type is set to slave and in place of the allow-update line is a directive telling named the IP address of the master server.

The following is an example slave server zone statement for example.com zone:

zone "example.com" { type slave; file "example.com.zone"; masters { 192.168.0.1; }; };

This zone statement configures named on the slave server to query the master server at the 192.168.0.1 IP address for information about the example.com zone. The information that the slave server receives from the master server is saved to the /var/named/example.com.zone file.