Choosing max-journal-size

[Anand Buddhdev]

On 30/11/2011 10:32, Phil Mayers wrote:

> We sort of did this accidentally. "max-journal-size" wasn't being set on
> our servers - the .jnl file for "imperial.ac.uk" was nearly 2Gb... oops.
> 
> The value I set it to eventually was pretty big - 128M globally - which
> on our biggest zones seems to give ~2 months of history. This is almost
> certainly overkill of a huge magnitude, but disk is relatively cheap!

We had a similar issue. One one server, with hundreds of zones, several
of which are updated frequently, we began getting disk space warnings
from our monitoring system. The .jnl files were the culprits.

We have a rather low setting of 10M for our journal size, but it's not
ideal since the rate of change of the zones isn't the same.

I think the default setting of "unlimited" for this option in BIND isn't
a very good one. It can catch a system administrator unaware. On the
other hand, I can't think what default setting the ISC folk could apply.

Anand Buddhdev
RIPE NCC