Automate secondary DNS with MSDNS as primary

[Kevin Darcy]

Barry Margolin wrote:

>In article <c579qj$1590$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
> "Shannon Hicks" <shan at criticaldigital.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>We are setting up a small hosting environment for our clients, but have
>>run into a problem with DNS. Our primary server is a Win 2k3 box running
>>Microsoft DNS (yeah, I know... "boo and hiss" to you too). I'm setting
>>up a box to be the secondary DNS server, and can make that either Linux
>>or another Win2k3 install.
>> 
>>Now, to my question... I want the process of adding a new client as
>>automated as possible, and would rather not have to add a new zone to
>>the config every time we add a new domain.
>> 
>>I've seen the scripts in Linux that do it, but would rather stay away
>>from a method that I can't support because of my lack of experience with
>>CRON and scripting in linux.
>> 
>>The only reason I'm asking this question again (yes, I see it's one of
>>the more popular ones) is because I couldn't find any that specifically
>>talked about MSDNS being the primary.
>> 
>>Any experts out there feel like helping another newbie?
>>    
>>
>
>As has been explained in all the other threads about this, there's 
>nothing in the DNS protocol that provides a way to find out all the 
>zones hosted by a server.  So whatever you do will have to involve 
>non-DNS mechanisms.
>
This is, of course, not to say that a DNS zone couldn't be used as a 
kind of "index" database to store the list of zones. I have a private 
"_zones" zone, for instance, that some of my Internet-facing slave 
nameservers use to determine the list of zones they should slave (each 
zone is represented by a single PTR record, which I prefer over TXT 
records because PTRs can benefit from label compression). It is often 
useful to leverage DNS itself for this kind of thing, since firewalls 
may limit the protocols that master and slave nameservers use to 
communicate with each other.

                                                                         
                                          - Kevin