secondary lag after NOTIFY

[Barry Margolin]

In article <920ott$6f4 at pub3.rc.vix.com>,  <neggybogger at my-deja.com> wrote:
>We use BIND version 8.2.2-P7 on primary and secondary.
>A cron job on the performs an ndc reload at 4am daily.
>We add a lot of zones and at 5am daily named.conf on the
>primary is FTPed over to the secondary.  Some "kung fu"
>then converts the master entries in named.conf into
>slave syntax. An ndc reload then takes place on the secondary.
>
>Following a record and SOA change in a primary zone file,
>it can take up to a week for it to appear in the secondary
>copy, in spite of logs on both servers showing the primary
>sending the NOTIFY promptly and the secondary ACKing it
>within about 30 mins.
>
>Messages of the following format appear in the secondary log,
>however inspections of the contents of (in this case)
>/home/named/slave/fred.com days later show that no update has
>taken place:
>
>"notify: NOTIFY(SOA) for zone already xferring (fred.com)"

We see this as well.  Occasionally, a zone will get "stuck" -- named thinks
it's in the middle of transferring it, but it's not, so it never starts the
transfer.  The only fix we've found is "ndc exec" to restart named from
scratch -- reload doesn't clear this up.

>Should we be ndc reloading the secondary every morning and is there
>really a need to ftp named.conf over from the primary every day if
>it is changing?

You certainly need to ftp the new named.conf file; how else is the slave
supposed to know about zones that have been added or deleted?  However, it
should be sufficient to use "ndc reconfig" rather than "ndc reload" to pick
up these changes in the named.conf (however, I've noticed that if a zone is
already in the axfr queue, neither reconfig nor reload will remove it --
when we removed several thousand zones that were pointing to a nonexistent
customer primary, we had to restart to cancel all the pending transfers).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.