Question regarding dynamic updates

[Chris Thompson]

On Sep 28 2008, David Forrest wrote:

>On Sun, 28 Sep 2008, Mike Diggins wrote:
>>
>> My DNS environment (BIND) consists of a Master Name Server which is
>> updated via a Database. A web page allows for changes, which updates the
>> database, and periodically the database is dumped out to zone files for
>> named, which are read and propagated to my slaves via regular zone
>> transfers.
>>
>> My question is about transitioning to Dynamic updates, which I am not yet
>> allowing. We have a number of zones, all updated through the Web interface
>> I describe above. What happens if I want a client to be able to update one
>> of those zones dynamically, while still updating all the static entries in
>> the same zone, via the Web/Database and zone transfers? Is that even
>> possible to update a zone this way, and allow dynamic updates? I can't
>> seem to wrap my head around that. Can someone straighten me out?
>>
>> -Mike
>>
>
>Investigate the rndc freeze and thaw commands.  I dynamically update my 
>internal zones this way as it rolls the dynamic .jnl files into the zones 
>and deletes the .jnls.  Although I seen on this list that the serial 
>numbers are updated, I haven't seen that.  But it looks like your database 
>dumping script would update them anyway so that would seem correct.
>
>I see this as a possibility:
>
>rndc freeze
>update database
>rndc thaw

I would rather advise you to make your own updates via DNS update 
operations. I can offer you a Perl script that compares two
normalised-by-"named-checkzone -D" zone files and generates input
to nsupdate(1) that will turn one into the other. This is primarily
intended for use when the whole zone contents are derived from the 
database, but you may be able to tweak it for use when some of the 
zone is under foreign control.

-- 
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 at cam.ac.uk