'succesful' nsupdate of remote server not persistent across nameserver restart?

[jasonsu at mail-central.com]

On Sun, May 1, 2016, at 11:05 AM, Phil Mayers wrote:
> > IIUC, though, a nameserver restart is supposed to force the write-to-journal immediately, right?
> 
> No, I don't think so.
> 
> Perhaps the behaviour in flush-zones-on-shutdown (which defaults to 
> "no") is what you're thinking of?
> 
> See also "rndc sync".

Well, TBH, I've got different sites saying different things :-/

Sticking with the more reputable resources, e.g. Zytrax, they agree with your assessment:

"All changes made to a zone using dynamic update are written to the zone's journal file. The server will periodically flush the complete contents of the updated zone to its zone file this happens approximately every 15 minutes. When a server is restarted after a shutdown or crash, it will replay the journal file to incorporate into the zone any updates that took place after the last zone file update."

My journal's NEVER getting written to the zone files.  Not after 15 minutes, or several days.  Can't seem to figure out why not.

The Zytrax site also advises:

"If changes have to be made manually to a dynamic zone then use the following sequence:

    Disable dynamic updates to the zone using rndc freeze zone which causes the zone file to be updated.
    Edit the zone file
    Run rndc unfreeze zone to reload the changed zone and re-enable dynamic updates
"
But , here, rndc freeze+unfreeze doesn't do a thing with the journal, either.

Don't yet know about 'flush-zones-on-shutdown', so looking into that now.

Jason