Need help with BIND

Hi all,

I am new to BIND. I have BIND 9 installed on my OpenBSD 3.3 box. I already have BIND 8 running on another OpenBSD box as my primary DNS server. Now my question is, will BIND 9 work with BIND 8? I want to be able to setup my BIND 9 OpenBSD box as a secondary DNS server. Or do I have to downgrade my BIND to BIND 8 to get them to work together?

Thanks in advance.

Define 'work together'.

If you mean, the one needs to replicate zone files from the other because it's secondary, then BIND 9 should be compatible with 8, and should be able to perform replication just fine.

If you mean, run BIND 8 and 9 on the same box/ip, then no, obviously that will not work.

Head here:

http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/

The FAQ can answer some questions, and they've got PDF docs about 9 and I would assume that it covers dealing with different versions.

Thanks for the tip. I just found out that the primary server is using BIND 4. Maybe I am being lazy here (to sift thru countless information on the net), but can I just change the format of the information in named.boot to BIND 9 format and save it on my slave server as named.conf?

eg. (in named.boot on my primary server)
primary test.com test.com

becomes: (in named.conf in my slave server)
zone "test.com" {
type slave;
file "slave/test.com";
masters {
111.222.333.13;
};
};

Will this work?

Will,

I run bind 8 nameservers, but I think the bind 9 configs are similar... if that's not the case, someone chime in and let me know.

You should be able to get yours working as is, I've had bind 8 secondary servers pulling off of bind 4 servers in the past. It should just be a config similar to yours.

My secondary zone conf lines look like so, which appear to be pretty much exactly what you've found:

zone "domain.com" {
type slave;
file "secondary/domain.com.sec";
masters {
192.168.0.10;
};
};

For personal readability, I like to tab out the colums, it's easier to find out what belongs where.

Also, I like to name my secondary zone files with .sec, again, for readability, and to be able to distinguish secondaried zones from primary zones.

-Gary

Heh, I just read my post, and it looks like the forum is stripping out the tabs...

Ok, so yeah, you're dead on.

-Gary

Thanks Gary,

I finally got my slave server up and running. I suppose I went about this the wrong way at the beginning. Lots of work configuring bind 4 and bind 8 compared to bind 9. All I had to do was to install and just update the named.conf file.



But I ran into a problem. I created a bogus domain on my primary server, updated named.conf on both server. I changed the ip address in the domain record on the master to see if my slave dns server will update the record. But I left the secondary server for a day now, and it's still pointing to the old ip address. How do you make the slave server check if the record has been updated?

Sorry. It just updated. So everything is cool.