Force constant zone transfer: Bind V4 and V8

[Barry Margolin]

In article <37FE070F.684BED89 at sitepak.com>, Shuo Lin  <shuo at sitepak.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>I'd appreciate suggestions before I do anything dumb in this case:
>
>We have a SunOS 5.5 box (#1) and Solaris 2.6 Sparc box (#2). Bind V4 on
>#1 and V8 on #2.
>
>The problem: #2 is main NS for a zone that's dynamically updated
>constantly. But #1 seems
>to do zone transfer from #2 only once an hour.
>
>Is there a way to force zone transfer? I'm also considering just
>installing V8 on #1. But since
>it's a machine in production (tons of sites on it)....

It does it at the frequency specified in the Refresh parameter in the SOA
record.  If you want it to happen more often, reduce that value.  However,
BIND doesn't do refreshes any more often than every 15 minutes, so setting
it below that won't make it any faster.

Installing BIND 8 would help, since it understands the NOTIFY protocol,
which the master server sends to all the slaves letting them know that the
zone has changed and they should do an immediate zone transfer.

>And a question is: When I do a query on the newly updated DN ( only
>availble on #2 at that
>moment), using some wild NS(#A), it would go to query #2, or #1. It's
>like randomly done. Isn't
>#A supposed to go ask #2 (primary NS) first, and then try #1(secondary
>NS)?

There's no way for a random NS to know which is the master or slave, that's
just a behind-the-scenes implementation detail.  Other servers keep track
of the response times of servers and query the best one; if their response
times are close they'll just pick one at random.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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