zone files updates

Simon Hobson dhcp1 at thehobsons.co.uk
Wed Sep 24 21:05:11 UTC 2008


David Forrest wrote:

>1. If I have to make changes to a zone file ($ZONE) dynamically 
>updated by dhcpd, is there a procedure to insure no corruption?

Yes, as Jeffrey T. Hutzelman says, you can freeze and thaw a zone. 
Alternatively, you must stop bind, edit the zone file, delete the jnl 
file, then start bind again.

>2. I note that the $ZONE.jnl seems to grow continuously even if I 
>stop bind and dhcpd. Does that mean that my original zone file is 
>never changed and dhcpd just inserts the changed records on a 
>temporary copy?  If I look at the $ZONE it has the $TTL starts and 
>ends in it but the serial number does not change (the file's 
>modification time stamp does though).

The zone file is updated, it is the MASTER copy of the zone data. The 
serial number should update frequently. However, I think the zone 
file is updated in batches and/or periodically so as to reduce the 
overhead of lots of small updates - so an update & serial number 
change may not appear immediately after a dynamic update, but will 
appear before the server quits if you signal it to quit.

The jnl file will grow in size, it is there primarily to support ixfr 
transfers to secondary servers. An ixfr transfer allows the secondary 
server to say "I have serial number X, please send me updates to 
bring me up to date", and the master will just send the delta between 
serial X and the current zone instead of sending the whole zone.

As Jeffrey T. Hutzelman says, this isn't really the right list, so if 
the above isn't enough then the bind users list is where you want to 
be. I would however suggest downloading the BIND Administrators 
Reference Manual which contains almost everything you might need to 
knwo about configuring and using BIND.



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