"Scavenging" DDNS records

Will Lists listswill at gmail.com
Wed Nov 16 22:28:39 UTC 2011


(I am going to post this individually to both the BIND and DHCP lists as
this crosses both, but not going to cross-post).


DHCPD 4.1-ESV-R3 & BIND 9.7.4

We've got about 20 /20 networks and another few /24 networks (all within
the 10/8 block) that are setup for approximately 50% of their total ranges
to be DHCP.  There is single forward lookup zone involved.

The network is fairly busy, but not as busy say as a college or someplace
where thousands or tens of thousands of people are coming and each day and
getting DHCP.  All leases are set for 8 days and the standard options for
update forwarding, update allow, etc. are set.  Clients are not allowed to
perform updates directly.

The issue that I am seeing is that about 2-3% of the time, when a DHCP
lease expires, some or all of the DNS records are not removed.  Sometimes
it's just the A records, sometimes it's the A & TXT record, sometimes it is
all of them (A, TXT & PTR).  If I am slacking on checking and cleaning this
up, the stale records might be there 2-3 months later still.

We migrated some time back from Windows DNS & DHCP, so we got used to
having the Windows implementation where it would scavenge old records that
were still in existence, but past their maximum lifetime without having
been updated (i.e. lease expired + X days).  There doesn't appear an
equivalent functionality in the ISC codebase, so I was considering writing
my own script to try and tackle this as it's a rather annoying issue to be
continually cleaning up old records using nsupdate as root.

A few questions:

- Does anyone have any suggestions on what to look at or try to figure out
what is going wrong this 2-3% of the time?

- Does anyone know how to actually perform the DHCID hash function?  I've
read all the RFCs and looked at the DHCPD source code and I'm not seeing
it.  I'd need to be able to determine the hash value for a record to see if
it actually belongs to the "expired" host or not.  (I think I need to
perform this).

 - Does anyone know of any sort of effort/project already out there that is
looking towards this scavenging?

My thoughts on what the process might look like (still rough and obviously
untested):

1.  Find an expired lease in the dhcpd.leases file.
2.  Get the IP address.
3.  Perform a reverse lookup on the IP to get the PTR record (this may be
problematic though since the PTR is not always there).
4.  Do a forward lookup to the get A and TXT records.
5.  Do a hash calculation.
6.  Compare to the TXT record to be sure this is the right record we are
about to delete.
7.  If a match, use nsupdate to delete all applicable "expired" records.
 If not a match then don't do anything.

This was just a quick process I white-boarded so I am pretty sure it's not
going to work out this way when all is said and done.


Thanks.

-Will
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