multiple primary servers

[Mathias Koerber]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000 Dino.Chirico at ot.com.au wrote:

| Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 13:55:51 +1000 
| From: Dino.Chirico at ot.com.au
| To: kcd at daimlerchrysler.com, comp-protocols-dns-bind at moderators.isc.org
| Subject: RE: multiple primary servers
| 
| 
| HI Kevin,
| 
| What I meant is redundancy, if the first primary server went down then the
| other primary server will be able to serve the zone files to the
| secondaries. Therefore both the primaries have the same data i.e. if I
| update one of the primaries then it will update the other primary server,
| through a zone transfer and the secondaries (slaves) will also be up to date
| through zone transfers using notify, by either of the primaries.

That does not make sense. The secondaries are there to provide redundancy (and
to some extent load sharing). You only need one primary. If that one
goes down, your EXPIRE value in the SOA will hopefully be large enough to
tide the secondaries over until the primary is fixed.

Two primaries only make for added overhead (of sync'ing these too) and
another possible point of creating problems (due to bad or missed syncs).

| 
| The scenario is that I do have a redundant network with a primary and
| secondary server on both sides. I only want to have one point to change the
| zone database but if it goes down then changes can be made to the redundant
| primary. The secondaries servers will be the ones that propagate to the
| internet. There are no issues with the secondaries propagating the zone
| database to the internet even when the are slaves for the zone database? I
| have not tested this on a live environment.
| 
| I have already configured the "master" option to look at either the primary
| servers on the secondaries and this does work fine but I need to have both
| primaries to have the same master zone files.

No, just use the 'masters' option to have each secondary look at the primary
first, then at the other secondary. Bingo. Although there are people who
don't recommend this...

| 
| As you mentioned below it is not possible using xfer, if you could give me
| how I could using an out of band mechanism it will it a go.

rdist, rsync? Ugly but might work. But really unnecessary and you are just replicating what
the xfer mechanism is there to do already...


Mathias