Master <--> slave named.conf "auto-generation"

[Chris Thompson]

On Mar 13 2008, bsd wrote:

>I would like to know if there is a way, whenever a new zone definition  
>is added to the primary master server, to have the slaves  
>automatically configure themselves with matching slave-zone definitions?
>
>If not - what are people currently using to acomplish this task?
>
>Have you got any good script that could help me achieve that in an  
>"elegant" way?
>
>What are the best path to achieve this knowing that I could have  
>master and slave file generated on one server (the master), how would  
>you handle the propagation of the named.conf (slave) file and signal  
>(rndc reload) and the slave?
>
>Any other advise / experience / experiment are welcome.

Well, you'll get responses telling you about management packages,
commercial or otherwise, that will do this sort of thing. As for
the possibility of using the DNS protocols themselves to do achieve
the desired effect, take a look at last month's thread "Why no function
to automatically add new zones to slave servers?" on bind-users.

What do we do? Generate the BIND configuration files from a common
master specification with some simple Perl scripts, rsync them to
the nameservers (4 currently, I don't claim this would scale well 
to hundreds), over ssh of course, and then do an "rndc reconfig"
also over ssh. All done from a control point which doesn't have
to be on any of the nameservers themselves. One could do the rndc
over the network as well, but as you need ssh access for the rsync
you might as well use it for rndc as well.

Is this "elegant" ? Well, I wrote most of it, so my opinion may be
biased :-) It's certainly much more reliable than the methods we
were using before.

-- 
Chris Thompson
Email: cet1 at cam.ac.uk