Indeed... I don't see a reason to have a private nameserver for a subdomain either. The ampr.org nameserver works well, it allows updates, maybe the only thing that could be nice is the ability to set TXT and other records. Having a subdomain just makes things more complex. The only reason I did a replication of the zone is that a local amateur who is running a newscast was telling the world that one of the advantages of AMPRnet/HAMNET is that it would continue to work when Internet was down. I explained him that it is not that straightforward as we depend on Internet services, most notably DNS. I thought a bit and decided to load the ampr.org zone in a nameserver on our gateway that already is working as a caching resolver for our 44.137.0.0/16 subnet. I think now it will resolve ampr.org names even without a connection (although I have not fully tested that yet). Of course only those names that are in the ampr.org zone, not those that are below a subdomain served by some other server. But we cannot cache the entire world's DNS, and only the ampr.org zone should be sufficient to connect most wellknown systems. I did not use AXFR, I download the zone from ftp://hamradio.ucsd.edu/pub/ampr.tar.gz Both methods have their advantages/disadvantages, I think. Rob