DNS Master server migration.

Anton Korotin anton.korotin at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 07:46:26 UTC 2008


On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Chris Henderson <henders254 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm migrating away from my 12 year old Solaris master DNS server to a
> new Linux based master server. I'm looking for suggestions on how to
> make the transition smooth without any downtime. The IP address of the
> new server will be different and so will be the hostname that will
> show up in the whois record. Is there any way to run two master at the
> same time and when I know the new master is working, I can turn off
> the old one? Would that be a good idea? I am open to any suggestions.

The most significant part of the process is to make sure that all
slave servers for all your zones have changed their
settings. If the slaves are beyond your control it can take time
and a considerable amount of human interaction.
So I can suggest you the following plan:

1. Freeze zone editing.
2. Copy all your master files to the new box and configure master zones there.
3. Change the settings on your old box: convert all master zones into
slaves and set up ip-address of the new box as an address of the
master.
4. Unfreeze zone editing.
5. Do all you need to do to change the settings on all slave servers:
now they've got to pull your zone from the new ip address.
6. On having the slaves changed their settings you can safely turn off
DNS service on your old box.
7. Now you have to change NS records in all your zones: replace the
old name with a new one.
8. The last step is to send update to your upper level domain registry
to change whois record and your parent zone.

If you don't change your zones frequently, you can skip step 3.
It provides just a possibility of zone changes propagation during the
transition period.

-- 
Anton



More information about the bind-users mailing list