Zone file generation configuration

[Kevin Darcy]

jeff donovan wrote:

>greetings all
>
>I'm looking for a way to speed up / Automate my record creation.
>
>First, is there any way to create zone files for larger than Class C 
>254 addresses ? I have multiple internal Class B's, and the file 
>creation takes for ever.
>i would love to be able to create a zone "10.10.in-addr.arpa"
>list all my reverse records
>and have a massive forward file.
>
>Is this possible? right now i have to create duplicate and grep, and I 
>can't believe there is not an easier way.
>
>comments info flames welcome
>
I guess I don't understand how you are generating your zone files. Are 
you using "h2n" to generate your zone files from /etc/hosts, or 
something like that? Or are you extracting information out of some sort 
of IP Address Management (IPAM) system to generate your zone files? I'm 
not sure we can help you with any of that, since /etc/hosts and IPAM 
systems are technically off-topic for this group/list.

The most efficient way I know of to manage DNS data that changes only 
incrementally, with BIND, is to use Dynamic Update (e.g. the nsupdate 
command-line utility, the Dynamic Update capabilities of the Net::DNS 
Perl module, etc.) for the changes. This also has the benefits of being 
capable of remote updating, securable via TSIG (or GSS-TSIG if you have 
a modified version of BIND that supports it), and never requiring a 
nameserver reload or the manual increment of a zone serial number. If 
you can get "delta"s from your information source, instead of whole 
database extracts/dumps, then maybe you can streamline things a lot by 
translating those deltas into batches of Dynamic Updates. Of course, 
there are some downsides of Dynamic Update too, e.g. making your zone 
files incompatible with manual edits (unless you can tolerate pausing 
the whole nameserver while those manual edits are being made), requiring 
that the "named" process have write permission to the zone files and/or 
zone-file directory, and ceding a certain amount of control over the 
format of your zone serial numbers (it is possible to update the serial 
numbers periodically via Dynamic Update in order to force them into a 
particular format, but it's fairly awkward).

- Kevin