Splitting off a sub-zone "atomically"

Phil Mayers p.mayers at imperial.ac.uk
Tue May 11 08:28:02 UTC 2010


On 05/11/2010 09:12 AM, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:
> On 10.05.10 16:20, Phil Mayers wrote:
>> We're doing some DNSSEC testing with sub-zones of our main zone, and I
>> had a little accident largely due to my own incompetence today where I
>> basically did this:
>>
>> 1. Existing zone "example.com"; create new zone "sub.example.com"
>>
>> 2. Run a SQL->DNS update; *.sub.example.com RRs are removed from
>> "example.com", and added to "sub.example.com"
>>
>> 3. Slaves immediately get the NOTIFY for "example.com" and remove the
>> records via IXFR, but aren't yet configured for "sub.example.com" (cron
>> job hasn't yet run)
>>
>> 4. Some time later, the cron job runs
>>
>>
>> Obviously between 3&  4 we weren't resolving "sub.example.com" on the
>> slaves. Tedious.
>
> that's why you should push glue NS records for sub.example.com to
> example.com pointing to servers that will have those zones (at least some of
> them must already have them). The same set of NS records should be in
> sub.example.com of course.

We run hidden master, so the (single) server which has the zone at 
creation time is not queriable. As per my original email, I realise that 
what I did was sub-optimal - I am asking about bind's behaviour in two 
slightly different alternatives.

Essentially, I guess I'm talking about the requirements for priming the 
new zone onto the slaves before creating the zone cut, and was wondering 
what bind did between the "rndc reconfig" and the AXFR completing. Mark 
has answered that - it returns SERVFAIL - which is all I wanted to know.

>
>> Obviously I can change my procedures to do:
>>
>>   1. Create zone on master
>>   2. For each slave:
>>      a. axfr file from master
>>      b. add zone into /etc/named.conf
>>      c. rndc reload
>>   3. On master, remove *.sub.example.com RRs from example.com
>>
>> ...but I was just curious.
>
> creating proper delegation is much safer way to achieve that.

It's difficult to see how that alone solves the problem along with a 
hidden master; you have to at the very least create the zone definition 
on the slaves first, else they'll NXDOMAIN queries rather than SERVFAIL 
them.

Thanks for all the info.



More information about the bind-users mailing list