Upgrade Utility for BIND??

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 10:57:33AM -0500, -=bina wrote:
> is there an easy way to upgrade from v4.9.7 to the latest v8.2.5??  some
> utility to automatically convert the db files, etc...
> 
> wondered if there was a software utility to handle that...
> thanks for any replies...
> -=bina

The "latest" is 9.2.0.  Fresh off the software lathes.

The V8 and V9 distribs have a program called 'named-bootconf'.  If you
run:

	bin$ cd /usr/src/etc	# or wherever you keep the RCS versions
	bin$ named-bootconf < named.boot > named.conf

I have not heard of any named.boot files that were not properly
converted.  You can also do some neat new things with your new
named.conf files.  ;-)

For the zone files, the only semi-mandatory thing is to put a "$TTL"
statement as the first line in each zone file.  The argument to the
"$TTL" statement is whatever number you currently have as the last
(formerly TTL, now negative TTL) entry in your SOA record.  So:

$TTL		86400

sets the TTL for all records to be 86400 seconds.  You can now also
say:

$TTL		1d

to signify 1 day instead of 86400 seconds.  24h or 1440m will also mean
the same thing.

I say "semi-mandatory" because most zone files do NOT have explicit
TTLs for all of their records.  If you do, or even if you have an
explicit TTL for just your SOA record, this is redundant.

As for other changes ... the newer versions of V8 and V9 started to
enforce correctness more and more, for security's sake.  So if you are
using something that used to be permitted, but is really illegal, you
may have to change it.  This is documented in ... hmmm ... nowhere that
I can find in V8; you just have to look at your 'syslog' output and see
what 'named' is complaining about.  In V9, the changes are documented
in doc/misc/migration.

--
Joe Yao				jsdy at center.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Systems Support					EMT-B
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