IXFR & manually edited zone files

[David Coulthart]

On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:24 PM, David Coulthart wrote:
> On Mar 7, 2011, at 11:42 AM, Chris Thompson wrote:
>> On Mar 7 2011, David Coulthart wrote:
>>> BIND Version: 9.7.3 on Solaris 9 & 10 (locally compiled)
...
>>> 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.
...
>> There is also a named-journalprint utility which you can apply to the
>> journal file on the master to check it contains what you hope for.
> 
> I don't see a journal file being created on the master after I do the reload.  The only messages in the master's log about a journal are on initial startup:
...
> Based on the description of ixfr-from-differences in the ARM, I think a journal file should be created.  I have named running as user named, but I've checked permissions on the directory & zone file & confirmed that named can create files in the directory containing the zone file.

It looks like the problem is with setting ixfr-from-differences to master.  If I instead set the option to yes, a journal file is generated & IXFR works correctly.  The zone definition in my test named.conf is:

zone "example.com" {
    type master;
    file "example.com.zone";
};

so I expected setting "ixfr-from-differences master;" would cause a journal file to be created for this master zone.  Am I not understanding what the master option for ixfr-from-differences is intended to do or is this a bug in BIND?

Thanks,
Dave Coulthart