bind9: automatically generate reverse zone file?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Jan Harnisch wrote:
> Hi Kevin,
> 
> and thank you for your answer.
> 
> 
>>No, BIND has no way to automatically generate the reverse zone files.
> 
> 
> Whew... so at least, I didn't overlook something.

Take a look at www.mkrdns.org for a very sweet little tool for doing 
exactly that job. You'll have to set the SOA records yourself the first 
time, but it nicely generate the PTR records and updates the serial 
number correctly, which are the painful parts.


>>Among other things, it would have to know your local convention for how
>>to deal with multiple A records pointing to the same IP address.
> 
> 
> Ahaa, didn't think about that. Thank you.

The mkrdns tool follows directives stashed in comment lines in 
/etc/named.conf. Again, very sweet little system. I just wish it would 
autogenerate the entire files, for adding and removing reverse zone files.

>>Generally speaking, forward/reverse synchronization is something that is
>>handled with whatever frontend/middleware tool you use for maintaining
>>DNS.
> 
> 
> Hmm, sorry for slowly getting off topic, but do you know about any 
> recommendable tool for doing this? Here I have an LDAP server, so I had 
> a short look at ldap2dns, but I would prefer a more simple, text-file 
> based solution, such as having both databases generated by a script 
> based on a hosts file or similar. I am trying to make my DNS server 
> machine as foolproof as possible, so attaching other complex software 
> isn't my preferred way to go; I just want to eliminate inconsistencies 
> with the lowest possible effort.
> Greetings & Thanks,

Webmin, www.webmin.org, to build the forward zones. *AVOID* webDNS, it's 
amazingly bad and encourages people to edit by hand, then edit with 
forms, and then only takes one set of changes. It also has no clue about 
multiple A records and is butt-painfully slow.

Use the BIND "named-checkconf" and "named-checkzone" commands as well: 
they're extremely helpful.