Auto add zones to secondary, from primary

[Kevin Darcy]

Scott Haneda wrote:
> I act as a slave for one client.  He is growing his business to the  
> point where I am finding it too laborious to add his slave zones all  
> the time.  I can script it a bit so I am just pasting in a list of  
> domains, but I wonder if there is not a provision in named for this  
> already.
>
> Is there any way to automate this?
>   
No, there's nothing in named or the DNS protocol itself to support this. 
There's been some talk in the IETF about a "provisioning protocol" but 
so far nothing seems to have come from that.

In the meantime, the various value-added products (e.g. Lucent's QIP) 
have their own proprietary way of doing this. And folks (like us) have 
rolled our own "autoslaving" subsystems. Usually those methodologies 
consist of either a) formatting a named.conf on the "master" side and 
blasting it verbatim along with the actual zone file(s) to the slave(s), 
or b) having some sort of "index" which the slaves pick up and then 
automagically configure their named.conf (the "index" could be records 
in a special DNS zone, a file which is rsync'ed out to the slaves 
periodically, any number of methodologies are possible).

As another idea, if you could get read access to your customer's 
named.conf file, then you could periodically compare version-to-version 
and add/delete slave-zone definitions as necessary.

- Kevin