Validating named configuration files before "reload"?

[Sam Wilson]

In article <001501bf3506$87c0d220$a220fea9 at acmebw.com>, "Cricket Liu"
<cricket at acmebw.com> wrote:

>> [ checking BIND's file before committing ]
>
>Call it what you want.  There's no substitute for the server
>parsing its own config files...
>
>The best you could do would be to use the same source that
>BIND does to parse the config file, and then your tool would
>have to change with each new release of BIND.  At that point,
>you may as well just use the server itself.

I'm not sure if you're saying "you may as well use your production
nameserver" or "you may as well use the nameserver code".  The latter is
slightly messy because of the overhead of running the server code as well
as the file parsing; the former is a Bad Idea because if you get the
config wrong your service may be down.  A config checker built from the
same source as the full bind seems like a sensible thing to want.

-- 
Sam Wilson
Network Services Division, Computing Services
The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK