How to fix a hand-edited dynamic zone?

[Tony Finch]

William_D. Colburn <wcolburn at nrao.edu> wrote:
>
> What I want to know now: is there a better solution to that problem than
> what I did?  Better practices for fixing that which I could have followed?

I think recovering from a secondary copy is about the best you can do.
The zone file and journal are no longer consistent with each other, but
the tools expect and require them to be consistent.

There's an exception: named-journalprint looks at the journal only, not
the zone file, so it doesn't require them to be consistent. So you can
recover by using named-journalprint to get a human-readable list of
changes to the zone, manually apply them to the zone file, then delete the
journal and restart `named`. This is much more tedious and error-prone
than a zone transfer, but it's an option to keep in mind in case you get
into more serious trouble.

To avoid the problem in the future, you can make this mistake less likely
by changing the masterfile-format to "raw", so that if anyone tries to
load the file into an editor they will be confronted by gibberish, and
hopefully (!) look for documentation that explains the right way to modify
the zone. My primary server has raw dynamic zones, and I use `nsvi` to
edit dynamic zones in place, or `nspatch` to update a live zone from a
file stored in version control. https://dotat.at/prog/nsdiff/

-- 
Tony Finch  <fanf at isc.org>  (he/they)  Cambridge, England
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