Any Pointers for Upgrading from 4.9.7 to 8?

[Marnix A. van Ammers]

I just recently did this conversion.  Our name servers are Sun Solaris boxes.  I
came upon a few things that you might want to know about.

o  Old SunOS boxes (SunOS 4.X) use an nslookup that uses inverse queries.
Applications on those old boxes might also use such queries or else they may
make use of nslookup.  In any case, we had one application that stopped working
and I had to back out.  After digging in, I found that adding 'fake-iquery yes'
to the options section of the named.boot file make them happy.  I may have the
exact option name wrong.  I'm doing this from another place and don't have
access to the boxes at work from here.

o  Some name servers weren't getting 'notify' messages when there was a change.
This was because they didn't have NS records.  Make sure any nameservers that
you want to have notify messages sent to, have NS records in the domain that is
being changed.

o Our firewall didn't allow our inside nameservers to talk to the outside
nameservers unless the originated from port 53.  So had to add another option
(something like 'source-port 53') to the options section.  The html
documentation that comes with bind 8.2.2 is nice, so make it available to you as
soon as you can.  Then you can fairly quickly find all the options you need.

o The nameserver complained about missing default TTL's.  Had to add '$TTL 3600'
in the zone files.  I put it just before the SOA record.  That stopped the
complaints.

o Despite a lot of talk about there being such a thing as incremental zone
transfers (IXFR), it doesn't seem that they work in bind 8.  We are transferring
entire zones every 10 or 15 minutes.  I hope bind 9 will have this feature
working and that it won't be too long before it's here.

o You have to use the 'nsupdate' command to add, delete, or change entries in
your zone files.  You can stop your name server and edit the zone files, but
normally you just use 'nsupdate'.  When you use 'nsupdate', be sure to enter a
blank newline before exiting.  When you enter the blank line, it makes nsupdate
activate what you've entered.

All in all, bind 8+ is *much* nicer.  The format of the named.conf file is much
easier (once you get used to it) and much more flexible.  Logging was a bit
complicated at first (for me anyway), but very flexible.  I love the automatic
rotation of log files.  You can set a limit of how many rotations per file and
at what size they should rotate and it works great.

I just saw that your article is already a month old.  So you've probably already
learned all of this.  Oh well.

Marnix A. van Ammers



Josh Higham wrote:

> There is a namedconv.pl (?) perl script that will translate the zone files.
> However, I'm not sure that it keeps all the information that you want.  I
> only took a quick peek, but it appeared to strip all the comments from the
> named.boot.  I made my own script, but our hosting setup is fairly
> straightforward, so it wasn't hard to do.
>
> Josh
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chad K. Schuller <chads at websuite.com>
> To: Bind List Server <bind-users at isc.org>
> Date: Wednesday, April 05, 2000 10:13 AM
> Subject: Any Pointers for Upgrading from 4.9.7 to 8?
>
> >To whom it may concern,
> >I am going to take the list advice...  Upgrading to version 8.  Our company
> >has been puting this off for way too long.  Anyone got any pointers?
> >How about a perl script that will change the named.boot to named.conf?  I
> am
> >assuming I can you the same zone files.  And yes, I do have to latest
> >version on o'relly.
> >TIA,
> >chads
> >
> >
> >