Faster zone transfer/less traffic

[Kevin Darcy]

At 20Mb over a slow link, I think this might be one of those rare situations
where rsync (as recommended by DJB) might actually make some sense, even though
it's more work to download/compile/install/configure/maintain than simply
defining the zone as "type slave".

What you'd do is set up the rsync part (from a cron job or whatever), and, if
desired, a secure connection mechanism (e.g. ssh), and then define the zone as
"master" in both servers. Whenever the zone changes, rsync the file over to the
slave and then tell it to reload the zone, either via rndc (BIND 9) or (BIND 8)
via a "ndc reload" remotely executed on the slave box (again, it might behoove
you to set up a secure channel for this, e.g. ssh, although if you don't
already have ssh set up, it might make more sense to upgrade to BIND 9 so that
you can use rndc instead -- this upgrade is something you're going to do at
some point anyway).


- Kevin

Terrence Koeman wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> I think someone here can help me.
>
> I have a particular zone that is about 20Mb on disk, the zone has a refresh
> interval of 1 hour. The zone usually changes within the refresh interval.
>
> This zone needs to be transferred between the master in the USA and a slave
> in The Netherlands, and the connection between them is not ideal. At the
> moment the transfer takes about 40 minutes, so the slave is pulling the zone
> almost all the time. In many cases the transfer times out and is restarted
> from the beginning.
>
> How can I improve this with BIND (master and slave both running BIND)?
>
> I saw something about IXFR, but I can hardly find any documentation about
> it. I'm guessing that IXFR only transfers the changes in the zone instead of
> the whole zone. Is this true? And if yes, what versions of BIND support it
> and how is it turned on?
>
> Another thing, I tried compressing the zone and it compresses down to less
> than a Mb. Does BIND have support for compressed zone transfers?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Terrence Koeman
>
> Technical Director/Administrator
> MediaMonks B.V. (www.mediamonks.nl)
>
> Please quote all replies in correspondence.