(really stupid) Zone file question

[Ben Scott]

On 4/29/05, Fred <puissante at biz.puissante.com> wrote:
> ... I am
> adding domain names -- zones -- frequently to computer A, and want a way
> to slave *everything* automatically to computer B.  On cursory look into
> the Bind docs, I see no obvious way to set this up.

  The generally accepted way of doing this is with rsync, as you
describe.  Indeed, rsync can be better then the Zone Transfer
protocol, because it can include comments, formatting, and non-zone
files (e.g., docs) that otherwise would be lost.  It's not kludgey if
done right.  It generally does involve using the "include" directive
in the named config file(s), and usually there's some kind of script
that gets used to generate a config file for the master and another
one for all the slaves.

  What I do is keep all my "master" zones in one directory, with names
based on the domain name (e.g., "example.com.zone" or
"2.0.192.in-addr.arpa.zone").  That lets a script easily generate a
list of domains by listing *.zone and dropping the .zone part.  Then
the script generates master.conf and slave.conf from that list, which
are included as  appropriate by named.conf files.

  You have to keep in mind the history behind Zone Transfers.  For
one, I believe they pre-date rsync.  More importantly, they are
designed to allow radically different implementations to exchange zone
information.  For example, you can use a BIND master with UltraDNS
slaves, even though BIND uses flat text files for zone storage and
UltraDNS uses a relational database.

  You're trying to solve a different problem.