Moving DNS from VMS to AIX

[Ray]

Hello all,

I'm in the planning stages of migrating our DNS service off of 2 VMS nodes
(running Multinet) to 2 RS/6000's running AIX 4.3.3.  Multinet DNS is
based on Bind 8, and has the same format for config files.

I copied the config and zone files over to AIX, changed the SOA and NS
records where appropriate, cranked up named and it all seems to work ok.  
I used nslookup and set server to the AIX box and it resolved stuff
fine...  i also set the AIX machine in /etc/resolv.conf on a few linux
boxes, and it also seemed to work fine.

My question is about the actual migration. 

1) I have lots of servers and clients with DNS hard-coded to the VMS
machines.  Is it ok to setup the VMS machines as a forward-only server to
ease the migration?  I read a lot about using forwarders in firewalled
setups, but nothing about using it like this, for migration.  Is there a
better way?

2) I'm also going to have to change InterNic and ARIN records to point to
the new DNS servers.  Is there a good way to "test" and make sure my AIX
machines are setup properly to handle outside queries?  My worst fear is
we get Internic and Arin records changed, and boom...nothing works.  I
have access to unix accounts outside my network, if that helps in
testing...

3) A combination of 1 & 2....  if i setup the VMS nodes as forward-only,
and forward to the AIX machine, will it still answer outside queries for
my domain on behalf of the AIX machine??  I am thinking if the query gets
forward to AIX machine, and he has authoritative data for my domain, then
he'll just answer.... but i'm not exactly sure if this is how it works.

My plan is to have all zone data on AIX. VMS will only be a
forwarder/cache server, and will forward all internal and external queries
to the AIX machine, until i get all our client configs and Internic/Arin
records changed... will this work? Is there a better way to migrate?

I'd greatly appreciate any insight on my situation from the BIND guru's
out there. :)  Thanks...

later!
Ray
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Ray DeJean                                            ray at cs.selu.edu
rdejean at selu.edu                              http://cs.selu.edu/~ray
Systems Administrator               Southeastern Louisiana University
--                                                                 --
Real programmers don't comment their code.  It was hard to write, it
should be hard to understand.
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