Making Manual Edits to Dynamic DNS Zones
Published on 7 Sep 2010 · Filed in Tutorial · 258 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)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:
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Halt changes to the dynamic DNS zone with the command
rndc freeze <zone name>. -
Make the manual edits to the zone file, being sure to increment the zone serial number.
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Use the command
named-checkzone <zone name> <zone file>to verify the syntax in the zone file. -
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.