I've got a mess

[Michael Barber]

An employee who didn't really seem to know 100% of what he was doing really
messed up our dns bad.  And although I have a lot of experience with Bind
2....we were moving to Bind 8 -- I believe and I'm not an expert there
either and I am very rusty anyways.  Here is a checklist of the many
problems I know I currently have.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

1.  I have the O'Reilly nutshell DNS & Bind book, Copyright 1992.  It
doesn't seem to cover much of any of this new stuff as the entire zone file
and conf file are different.  Is the O'Reilly book still the best book or is
there a better book now on how to configure these new dns format files?

2.  I've put the dns files on VisualSource safe as they were not under any
SCCS earlier.  Is there any new standard dns editor tools that have been
made available that allow you to change the TTL in all zone files or the
like for example.  I hope so...because:
    a.  All of the TTL's have been changed to 1800
    b.  A TTL of 1800 has been added to all  A records.

3.  This person belived the secondary named.conf would automatically update
and pull from the primary.  This was not true in version 2....so I'm
assuming that this is a new feature of 8????  These lines were supposedly
added to do this in the secondary named.conf.

options {
 named-xfer "c:\winnt\system32\dns\bin\named-xfer";
 transfer-source 207.168.174.130;
 max-transfer-time-in 30;
 transfer-format one-answer;
 transfers-in 20;
};

I do not believe that these lines will do that in ver 8 either will they?

4.  My secondary is taking a long time to update from the master....  its
the
604800  that is affecting that right?

1800 IN SOA ns.comcity.com. webmaster.comcity.com. (
  2004041306 43200 7200 604800 1800 )

Thank You very much.
Michael