BIND master to master transfer

[Kevin Darcy]

Jason Staudenmayer wrote:

>I'm running a master and slave BIND 9.3 servers. These serve my AD
>domain. I would like to move the master to server 2 (slave) and then
>have the current master be slave. What's the safest way to do this
>without having the AD DC freak along with the Exchange2k3 server.
>Thanks
>
For ordinary DNS resolution, no-one should really care who is the master 
and who is the slave. So I can't imagine why Exchange would inherently 
have an issue with this migration (although I've never dealt directly 
with Exchange, so take that with a grain of salt).

Any issues related to record caching can be handled by lowering the TTLs 
on the relevant A record(s) prior to the migration.

As for AD, it's presumably doing Dynamic Updates to your server, so it 
might care what's in the MNAME field of the SOA record. You may want to 
consider changing the MNAME to some "alternate" name, one that resolves 
to the same IP address as your current master, but isn't the "regular" 
name by which it is usually known. You'll need a matching NS record 
pointing to that name as well. At the time of migration, you can then 
change just the A record owned by that "alternate" name, without having 
to touch anything else. If you're really paranoid about Dynamic Updates 
failing during the changeover, you could, theoretically, configure 
update forwarding from the old master to the new one, which should work 
fine in BIND 9.3 (although, I've never configured update forwarding, so 
again, take that suggestion with a grain of salt).

                                                                         
                                                   - Kevin