IXFR & manually edited zone files

[David Coulthart]

BIND Version: 9.7.3 on Solaris 9 & 10 (locally compiled)

Our current workflow for managing DNS involves generating master zone files from a database, pushing the new files to a hidden master nameserver & then running "rndc reload" on that nameserver.

Based on the ARM & a posting to bind-users[1], I enabled "ixfr-from-differences master;" on the hidden master expecting the master nameserver would generate a "diff" from the previous zone file in memory and the new one being loaded so it could send an IXFR to the slaves.  However, every time the slave requests an IXFR, it gets a non-incremental response & has to perform a full AXFR.  I've configured this in a test environment with a single zone file so I know the slave has the first version of the zone file before loading the second version on the master & it still results in a AXFR-style IXFR.  I've explicitly stated the options allow-query & allow-transfer in the config, but I do not have allow-updates configured, relying on the implicit default of denying all updates.

Is there something I'm missing to get this working?

Thanks,
Dave Coulthart

1.  https://lists.isc.org/pipermail/bind-users/2010-January/078591.html