AW: ipv6 PTR in zone file

[Bill Larson]

On Apr 13, 2011, at 4:58 PM, Michel de Nostredame wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 3:41 AM, Niall O'Reilly  
> <Niall.oReilly at ucd.ie> wrote:
>> On 12 Apr 2011, at 10:49, Michel de Nostredame wrote:
>>> Thanks Walter and Marco. Those two tool/method do resolve short term
>>> needs. Thanks again.
>>> (btw, the URL form Walter should be
>>> ftp://ftp.bieringer.de/pub/linux/IPv6/ipv6calc/ )
>>>
>>> Beside them, is any potential possibility to have something build-in
>>> in BIND config/zone file as kind of beautiful (my, and my team,
>>> personal point of view) solution?
>>>
>>> Anyone knows if there was any similar discussions inside BIND
>>> developer group before?
>>
>>        Not that I recall.
>>
>>        I'm not sure what benefit you see in adding a feature to
>>        the BIND server and tools.  I should have thought that a
>>        suitable script, either for provisioning your zone file(s)
>>        or for applying a dynamic update, would both relieve any
>>        burden you currently have, and leave you more flexibility
>>        than would an extension to BIND.
>
> If there is $REVERSE (or some similar directive) can put inside ZONE
> file and named.conf file, then it would be a good help for those
> people who need to manually manage PTR records. From regular people
> point of view, it could be easier to read, maintain and less possible
> of human errors.
>
> Not sure how large will be the effort to add a new directive into
> BIND, but that just a feed back, and wish, from me and my team
> members, who needs to maintain few hundreds of statically assigned IPs
> for servers and CE/PE routers.

Back in the good old days, when DNS administrators didn't have fancy  
tools, there was a common solution to this problem.

I wrote a little script which took a host name and an IP address  
(IPv4, but the idea would be the same for IPv6) and generated the  
forward DNS "A" record for this and append it, or insert it, into the  
forward zone file.  Then, this same script would then take this same  
information and add the appropriate "PTR" into the appropriate reverse  
zone file.  The "h2n" script was another tool commonly used to manage  
DNS information from the contents of the /etc/hosts file.

The problem with introducing some new directive into BIND is that your  
idea of what would be the appropriate zones files to work with may not  
be the same as someone else.  For example, in the forward zone, would  
assigning MX records be the "correct" result also?  There are too many  
possibilities to allow solving everyone's needs.  This is something  
that needs to be done by the DNS administrator who understands the  
needs of the zone.  (At least in my very humble opinion).

Bill Larson