Moving DNS from VMS to AIX

[Ray]

On Mon, 1 May 2000, Barry Margolin wrote:

> Wow, I wasn't aware that Multinet had picked up BIND 8.  Good for them!

Yep!  When i read in the release notes before we upgraded that they'd
switched to BIND 8, i was all "yea cool! that rocks!!".  The VMS guys said
"so? what does that mean?" hahahaha  :-)

> Configuring them as secondary servers would also be a reasonable way, but
> either way should be fine.

Hmm...for some reason i hadn't considered this.  Seems to be a better
solution than all the forwarding.

> dig <a name in your domain> a @<newserver> +norec
> 
> should send a query just like a resolving server does.  Make sure the
> answers come back with the "aa" (Authoritative Answer) flag set.

Great!!  The aa flag was set both when i queried the VMS and AIX
nodes...looks like i'm good to go, thanks.  Are there any docs on what the
flags mean? The dig man page is a little lacking... (IBM didn't even ship
dig with named).

> It will work, but it's not *strictly* correct.  The servers that a domain
> is delegated to are supposed to be authoritative, but a forwarding server
> will respond with data from its cache if it has recently forwarded the same
> query and cached the answer, and cached data is not authoritative.  I don't
> think this should cause problems, but you might get complaints about lame
> delegations; if it's only intended to be a temporary situation during the
> transition, you should be OK.

Ahhh... i see what you mean with the lame servers.  I'd rather not have
them answering non-authoritatively.   I think slave servers is a better
solution...  so even though VMS are slave servers to AIX, they will still
answer authoritatively?   I remember reading that once the slave starts up
and does the zone transfer, then it looks exactly like the primary,
correct?

> As I mentioned above, you could configure the VMS nodes as slave servers.
> That will solve the problem of them answering non-authoritatively.

Sounds good...i'm going to try that first.  Hopefully there are not any
major caveats in slaving the VMS guys from AIX.... i'm not sure how
extensively Process modified the BIND code to get it running on VMS.  
crossing my fingers.... :)

later!
Ray