Moving DNS from VMS to AIX

[Harold Pritchett]

If you can, I believe the right answer is to move the VMS Multinet 
systems to new IP addresses, and use their previous IP addresses
for the AIX servers.  That way, nothing DNS related has to change.  

People accessing these VMS machines for other purposes should be
using their names, and will get the new addresses.  DNS is the
only service which requires that the IP addresses of the servers
be hardcoded in all of the clients.

On the other hand, there may be reasons why this won't work.

Harold Pritchett
The University of Georgia

Ray wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm in the planning stages of migrating our DNS service off of 2 VMS nodes
> (running Multinet) to 2 RS/6000's running AIX 4.3.3.  Multinet DNS is
> based on Bind 8, and has the same format for config files.
> 
> I copied the config and zone files over to AIX, changed the SOA and NS
> records where appropriate, cranked up named and it all seems to work ok.
> I used nslookup and set server to the AIX box and it resolved stuff
> fine...  i also set the AIX machine in /etc/resolv.conf on a few linux
> boxes, and it also seemed to work fine.
> 
> My question is about the actual migration.
> 
> 1) I have lots of servers and clients with DNS hard-coded to the VMS
> machines.  Is it ok to setup the VMS machines as a forward-only server to
> ease the migration?  I read a lot about using forwarders in firewalled
> setups, but nothing about using it like this, for migration.  Is there a
> better way?
> 
> 2) I'm also going to have to change InterNic and ARIN records to point to
> the new DNS servers.  Is there a good way to "test" and make sure my AIX
> machines are setup properly to handle outside queries?  My worst fear is
> we get Internic and Arin records changed, and boom...nothing works.  I
> have access to unix accounts outside my network, if that helps in
> testing...
> 
> 3) A combination of 1 & 2....  if i setup the VMS nodes as forward-only,
> and forward to the AIX machine, will it still answer outside queries for
> my domain on behalf of the AIX machine??  I am thinking if the query gets
> forward to AIX machine, and he has authoritative data for my domain, then
> he'll just answer.... but i'm not exactly sure if this is how it works.
> 
> My plan is to have all zone data on AIX. VMS will only be a
> forwarder/cache server, and will forward all internal and external queries
> to the AIX machine, until i get all our client configs and Internic/Arin
> records changed... will this work? Is there a better way to migrate?
> 
> I'd greatly appreciate any insight on my situation from the BIND guru's
> out there. :)  Thanks...
> 
> later!
> Ray
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> Ray DeJean                                            ray at cs.selu.edu
> rdejean at selu.edu                              http://cs.selu.edu/~ray
> Systems Administrator               Southeastern Louisiana University
> --                                                                 --
> Real programmers don't comment their code.  It was hard to write, it
> should be hard to understand.
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=