[olug] setting up a mirror (slave?) DNS server?

[Sean Kelly]

BIND does per-zone configuration. There is no setting to have it secondary
all zones. There is no query in the DNS protocol that would allow the secondary
server to get a list of all domains hosted by the primary server. The best
it can do is request a full or incremental transfer of a specific zone.
This is why you must configure each zone manually.

My question to you is whether you want this new nameserver to only run when
the other one is down or broken, or do you want it to run all the time? DNS
is designed to support multiple servers in case one is dead, so it would
make sense to me to set them up like this:

 * Primary 
 * Secondary
 * New server you're setting up

In such a configuration, really the only good way to set this up would be
to do the per-zone configuration you seem to already be familiar with. That
would allow you to reliably support incremental zone transfers and updates
across all your servers.

How many zones are you working with here?

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 03:10:11PM -0500, Ryan Stille wrote:
> We currently have BIND running on one of our servers.  Its a primary 
> name server for us, and a secondary for a partner of ours (and they are 
> our secondary).
> 
> I'd like to setup BIND on another server here that would basically be a 
> mirror of ours, ready to be used if ours fails.  Whats the best way to 
> go about this?  I could FTP all the named files over once an hour or 
> whatever.  But I was thinking there should be a way to use the 
> master/slave functionality to have the new server just slurp all the 
> data from our master server automagically?  (if thats true why do I need 
> to always add my new zones to named.conf on our secondary server?)  Any 
> suggestions or URLs welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Ryan
> 
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-- 
Sean Kelly          | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly at smkelly.org | http://www.smkelly.org