Ever growing jnl files

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009, Mike Eggleston wrote:

> On Wed, 07 Jan 2009, Nicholas F Miller might have said:
> 
> > We have a few dynamic zones that are provisioned using Addhost. When  
> > addhost adds records to the zone every night it will run "nsupdate <  
> > update.file". The update.file will contain records like these:
> > 
> > prereq yxrrset machine.colorado.edu. in a
> > update delete  machine.colorado.edu. in a
> > 
> > prereq yxrrset machine.colorado.edu. in hinfo
> > update delete machine.colorado.edu. in HINFO
> > 
> > This all works fine but the jnl doesn't ever go away after nsupdate  
> > runs like this. The jnl will continue to be appended to every night  
> > when nsupdate is run again. If we use nsupdate without feeding it a  
> > file the jnl will disappear like it's supposed to. Is this a glitch in  
> > bind bind-9.5.0-P2?

I am not sure how the remote server would behave different with "nsupdate" 
versus "nsupdate < file" (assuming same input).

> What about a crontab entry for once a week or once a month that does a
> freeze/unfreeze to force the jnl file to get played into the zone files?

This is unrelated. The synchronization of the dynamic update data (in the 
journal database) to the real zone file is done occasionally -- and may be 
delayed by up to 15 minutes. (This time is not configurable other by 
redefining DNS_DUMP_DELAY macro to number of seconds in the build 
environment and rebuilding BIND.)

The journal file may continue to grow when it is also used for IXFR 
tracking for incremental zone transfers.