Secondary Zone 'Raw' File format

[Evan Hunt]

> A new option was added in 9.9 to cache slave zones in 'raw' format rather
> than text format.

That's actually always been an option ("masterfile-format raw;") and is
recommended for servers with a lot of slave zones because it reduces
startup time considerably--it takes about half as long to load a zone
if you don't need to parse text.

What changed in 9.9 is that it's now the default behavior, and you have
to specify "masterfile-format text;" if you want to save a slave zone in
text format.

> Is there any specific documentation on what the format of this 'raw' format
> actually is?

It's just DNS wire format, not much different from what you'd see if
you ran a sniffer during a zone transfer.  You can convert it to text
format to see what's in the file with:

    named-checkzone -D -f raw <zonename> <filename>

-- 
Evan Hunt -- each at isc.org
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.