add a zone with nsupdate ?

[Kevin Darcy]

Bill Larson wrote:

> There are a couple of problems with the idea of using dynamic DNS to create a
> new zone, the first is that it really won't work.  Dynamic DNS needs to obtain
> the SOA record for the zone prior to updating it, but there isn't an SOA record
> because you are trying to create it.  A chicken and egg situation.

If you're adding an SOA RR and one or more NS RRs via Dynamic Update, then the
server has all of the resource-record information it needs to create a zone.

> The second problem is that all dynamic DNS can modify are the zone files.
> Dynamic DNS does NOT make any aattempt to modify /etc/named.conf.  In fact, all
> "named" needs to be able to do is read named.conf, and if you are using the
> "-u" option to run as an unprivileged user, this is exactly what will happen.
> There is no reason that the user than named is running under has to have write
> capability to the configuration file, but this user MUST be able to write to
> zone and log files - which implies the ability to write to the directories that
> contain these files.

I have proposed to bind-suggest a way to template automatically-created zones. The
"automatic" zone definitions wouldn't necessarily have to be written to named.conf
itself; they could be written to some sort of adjunct config file.

> Sorry, you are stuck with using "vi" (or other editor of your choice) to edit
> the named.conf configuration file itself.  There is a strong interest in having
> a GUI based configuration editor, and there are some available, such as Webmin
> (http://www.webmin.com/webmin/) and Gaymede
> (http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/~broccol/gash2/), that attempt to assist in this
> job.  But from what I hear they aren't perfect - but I haven't worried about
> this either.  So check these tools out if you are interested.  A listing of
> some DNS administration tools can be found at
> http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/tools.html.

Zone-creation is still one of the last remaining things I have to do manually.
Fortunately zone-creation isn't very frequent in our internal DNS. But I still
have a strong interest in getting this to work through Dynamic Update since the
rest of my maintenance system is based on that.


- Kevin

> Francois MARTIN wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I read some mailing lists but noboby really answer to this question which is
> > to know if there is a dynamic way to add a zone to a DNS server.
> >
> > I mean by "adding a new zone", to have the possibility to insert the
> > declaration of the zone in the /etc/named.conf automaticaly instead of using
> > a text editor and to run "ndc reload".
> >
> > The nsupdate utility allows to add and remove RR but doesn't seem to allow
> > the creation of zones.
> >
> > So if someone has informations about that or I someone can answer this
> > question, it'd be very great because I'm sure I'm not the only one to wonder
> > this.
> >
> > Thanks.
> > François.