bind9 answers no queries during AXFR

[Chris Buxton]

The ideal solution would be to convince whoever owns the master server 
to enable dynamic updates, and then to use them to update the zone. 
That way, your server requests an IXFR instead of an AXFR, and the 
whole thing goes a lot faster. But this may require them to rewrite any 
automated system that modifies the zone.

If that's not an option, you could in theory recreate the axfr process. 
Set your server up as a master, using the zone file already on disk. 
Then write a script to poll their server for updates, perhaps once an 
hour, and get a zone transfer (using 'dig' redirected to a file). Then 
tell your server to reload the zone from disk. This should, in theory, 
lead to less downtime than acting as a slave, since disk access is so 
much faster than network access. But there will still probably be a 
noticeable hiccup in the operation.

Regards,
Chris

On Aug 9, 2004, at 7:46 AM, Martin H. Sluka wrote:
> We got a BIND9 server which is a secondary for a very large DNS
> zone (an RBL; about three million entries, 70 MB as file, several
> hundred MB in RAM) that usually updates each few hours.  Even on
> current hardware, the zone transfer (or reading the zone after
> the transfer) takes several minutes.
>
> The problem is, that BIND9 does not seem to answer _any_ queries
> during the update phase.  Any help to solve this problem would be
> appreciated.  (Splitting the zone is, however, not possible.)
>
> Regards,
> Martin
>