I've got a mess

[Barry Margolin]

In article <c5n0fi$gj4$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 "Michael Barber" <mikeb at comcity.com> wrote:

> 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

BIND 2?  I think you mean BIND 4 (it's the version with a "named.boot" 
file instead of "named.conf").

> 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?

The O'Reilly book is up to its 4th edition, which now covers BIND 9.  
The config file is completely different, but zone files are essentially 
the same.

> 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.

There's no standard tools for this.  It's pretty easy to write sed, awk, 
or perl scripts to do it.

> 
> 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.

If you mean that it automatically learns about added and deleted zones, 
it's not true in any version of BIND.  Slave service must be configured 
manually on a per-zone basis, by adding a "slave" statement to the slave 
server's named.conf file.

> 
> 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?

Do what?  Those options set parameters used when doing zone transfers.

> 
> 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 )

No.  The 604800 is the Expire field.  This means that if the slave is 
unable to update from the master for 1 week, it will discard its 
authoritative data for the zone.

The 43200 could be your problem -- that specifies how often the slave 
polls the master to see if the zone has changed.  43200 seconds is 12 
hours.  However, if the master server implements DNS Notify, it should 
send a message to the slave whenever a new version of a zone is loaded, 
and the slave should perform a zone transfer immediately.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***