a newbie question: how do i upgrade my bind 4.9.7 to latest version

Cricket Liu cricket at acmebw.com
Mon Aug 30 17:52:48 UTC 1999


>     Cricket> What does everyone think?
>
> I think it's a bad idea. If it has to be implemented, it should be in
> some other script, not named-bootconf.

I have no argument with that.  We can write it as an ancillary script, and
then have a higher-level convert2bind8 that calls named-bootconf and then
convert-masterfile.

> Scripts to aid the migration to
> BIND8 are all very well, but IMHO there's no substitute for a decent
> FAQ or README in the distribution.

Okay, Jim, we're waiting.

>     Cricket> It'd be fairly easy to implement.
>
> In theory yes, in practice I suspect it'll cause more problems than it
> solves. First of all, the clueless won't read the README or run the
> zone file munging script, so the same question about the log message
> will continue to be asked anyway. [And probably not much less
> frequently than it gets asked just now.]

I can hardly believe that it would cause more problems than it would solve.
By your reasoning, isn't providing a migration script like named-bootconf
itself a bad idea?  After all, if we simply required administrators to learn
BIND 8 named.conf syntax on their own, we wouldn't have to deal with all
these newbies who don't know how to add a zone statement.

But if we provide a conversion script, shouldn't it do as complete a job as
possible?

So what if we don't solve the problem for 100% of name server
administrators.  If we make life easier for even a small number of them who
do run named-bootconf, isn't that worth a little development effort?

And if the clueless won't read the README, why do you assert that there's no
substitute for a decent README in the distribution?  I imagine the clueful
could do without it.

> Secondly, the script will
> have to take account of every possible version control that might be
> in use. I assume/hope everybody puts their zone files into RCS or SCCS
> or CVS or whatever.

Why?  Say it stream edits the zone data files and prepends $TTL control
statements.  If an administrator hasn't co'd the files, then he's no worse
off than if the script hadn't done anything at all.  Or if the script simply
creates new zone data files with $TTL control statements at the beginning,
how is that different from creating a new named.conf file?

> Thirdly the script won't be much help to the folk
> who generate their zone files from things like h2n. That probably
> causes more trouble: we'll get questions like "I didnt get those 'No
> default TTL set' messages before, so why do I get them now?".

h2n can generate a BIND 8 named.conf file, so there's no need to use
named-bootconf.  Moreover, I can fix h2n to prepend $TTL.

cricket

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cricket at acmebw.com
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