Named.conf on slave servers

[Kevin Darcy]

Jim Reid wrote:

> >>>>> "Alex" == Alex Pavluck <apavluck at cypresscom.net> writes:
>
>     Alex> I am going to run Bind8 on 5 servers.  One server will be a
>     Alex> Master and the other 4 will be Slaves.  I wanted to know if
>     Alex> there is a simple way to set this up so that I don't have to
>     Alex> update my named.conf files on all the Slave servers
>     Alex> everytime I add a new domain.
>
> No. If named.conf isn't changed named.conf when there's a new name
> server configuration how can the servers be expected to see those
> changes? What you need to do is write a script to generate named.conf
> files, remote copy the files to the slave servers and then "ndc
> reconfig" them. You can make this job easier on yourself if all the
> slave servers have the same named.conf. ie none of them have to
> contain options or features that are host- or OS-specific.

Another method, which we use, is to have a cron script on the slaves
which checks all of the delegations in the DNS database itself, and
modifies the local named.conf accordingly, adding or deleting slave
definitions. Since our DNS servers are also security (Kerberos) servers,
this avoids any potential security problems associated with remote copy.
It also offloads our primary. A couple downsides are: 1)  it doesn't run
on-demand, and 2) it only takes care of the basic, albeit most common,
named.conf changes -- things like also-notify, allow-query, sortlists,
etc. still require a separate propagation mechanism.


- Kevin