DNS and BIND, 5th Edition

Chapter 7. Maintaining BIND

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

This chapter discusses a number of related topics pertaining to nameserver maintenance. We’ll talk about controlling nameservers, modifying zone datafiles, and keeping the root hints file up to date. We’ll list common syslog error messages and explain the statistics BIND keeps.

This chapter doesn’t cover troubleshooting problems. Maintenance involves keeping your data current and watching over your nameservers as they operate. Troubleshooting involves putting out fires—those little DNS emergencies that flare up periodically. Firefighting is covered in Chapter 14.

Controlling the Nameserver

Traditionally, administrators have controlled the BIND nameserver, named, with Unix signals. The nameserver interprets the receipt of certain signals as instructions to take particular actions, such as reloading all the primary zones that have changed. However, there are a limited number of signals available, and signals offer no means of passing along additional information such as the domain name of a particular zone to reload.

In BIND 8.2, the ISC introduced a method of controlling the nameserver by sending messages ...