Dynamic Update - Bind 8

[Kevin Darcy]

Well, we use Win2K around here but we have the autoregistration feature
disabled, so I'm not really qualified to talk about implementation specifics.
However, I have substantial experience with Dynamic Update in BIND, so I can
answer some of your more general questions:


Clay Hilton wrote:

> Are there any "gotchas" or
> known problems to look for in this process (or is this fairly simple to do)?

The big "gotcha" is that, once you enable Dynamic Updates for a zone, then the
only reasonable way to update that zone from that point on is via Dynamic
Update. Manual updates of the zonefiles are risky: you're put into a no-win
situation of either a) making the updates while the nameserver is running, in
which case you risk having your changes overwritten by named, or b) stopping
the nameserver while you make your update, in which case you risk losing
Dynamic Updates that are attempted while the master is down (not to mention
inconveniencing clients, slaves, etc.) So if you have zones (e.g. reverse
zones) containing a mixture of Win2K clients and non-Win2K clients, you may
have to resort to "nsupdate" or some similar kind of tool to update the
non-Win2K clients.

> One more question - once I enable these dynamic updates about how long will
> it take for the DNS database to update?

They are reflected in the master server immediately, but may take a while to
propagate out to slaves and caching servers, as dictated by the REFRESH/RETRY
settings in your SOA record, and the TTLs on your records, respectively.


- Kevin