DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

NOTIFY (Zone Change Notification)

As we described earlier, secondaries have traditionally used a polling scheme to determine when they need a zone transfer. The polling interval is called the refresh time and it’s specified as a field in a zone’s SOA record. Other parameters in the zone’s SOA record govern other aspects of the polling mechanism.

But this scheme requires the secondaries to ask the primary, “Has the zone changed yet?”, over and over. Wouldn’t it be nice if the primary name server could tell its secondary servers when the information in a zone changed? After all, the primary name server knows the data has changed: every time a zone is changed with the DNS console or a dynamic update message is received, the server immediately changes the zone in its memory. The primary’s notification can come soon after the actual modification instead of waiting for the refresh interval to expire.

RFC 1996 describes a mechanism that allows primary servers to notify their secondaries of changes to a zone’s data. The Microsoft DNS Server implements this protocol, called NOTIFY for short.

NOTIFY works like this: when a primary name server notices a change to data in a zone, it sends a special notification message to all secondary servers for that zone. It uses the list of NS records in the zone to build the list of servers to notify. The primary removes any NS record corresponding to the local host, which prevents it from sending a notification message to itself. You can also ...