Making Manual Edits to Dynamic DNS Zones

This is one of those posts that is as much for my own benefit as it is for others. For a few weeks now, I’ve been working on a dynamic DNS setup for my home/home office network involving BIND and the ISC DHCP daemon running on a pair of OpenBSD virtual machines. I finally got it to work (thanks in no small part to this article and this how-to post) and then found that I needed to make some manual edits to the DNS zones.

After a great deal of stumbling and fumbling, I found an obscure reference to a need to use rndc when making manual edits. After some testing, I learned that the “correct” way to make manual edits is as follows:

1. Halt changes to the dynamic DNS zone with the command rndc freeze <zone name>.
2. Make the manual edits to the zone file, being sure to increment the zone serial number.
3. Use the command named-checkzone <zone name> <zone file> to verify the syntax in the zone file.
4. Allow changes to the dynamic DNS zone with the command rndc thaw <zone name>.

If you monitor the appropriate log files (on my system I had to monitor /var/log/daemon), you’ll see zone transfers take place to any secondary name servers, a strong indicator that the change has successfully been accepted and propagated.

A very simple task, I know, but hopefully this post will help me next time I need to do this same task again and hopefully it will help someone else out there in the same situation.