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Sean Harvey OAO Corp harvey@nmc8.chinalake.navy.mil
Ridgecrest CA (619)939-2199
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts;
wisdom lies in their simplification.
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Thanks for the replies. The dialog pointed me in the right direction and increased my understanding of this topic. It seems, in answer to question 1, that the name server databases stored in memory are copied from the primary to the secondary, not the config files. That explains the differences between the two files. It does not explain why some of my MX records were not complete but a good tip was to run this command:
kill -INT </etc/named.pid> which dumps the database from named's memory cache to a file called /usr/tmp/named_dump.db. I examined this file and found that the MX records were incomplete there also. There is something else going on that I'll keep looking into.
Question 2 was just ignorance. I'm better now. There is a serial number in each of the named files, not just named.local AND the files are updated regardless of the serial number after the specified SOA directed expire time interval.
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ORIGINAL QUESTION:
Dear friends-
DNS question: I set up a secondary DNS server at our site. The install was very simple and straightforward and it seems to work to some degree. I'm confused about a couple of things.
1) When the secondary came up the first time it fetched named.hosts from the primary as advertised but the file on the secondary does not match the primary one. In particular, some MX records were not intact while others were.
2) There is a field called Serial in named.local of the primary server. It looks like this: 867.23 ; Serial
Reading in the O'Reilly DNS book I understand this field to be a flag signalling to the secondary that changes have been made to the files on the primary and a named-xfer needs to be run, updating the secondary server's files.
The number never changes on my primary server yet the secondary seems to be updating it's files.
Can someone please download some wisdom on this subject to me.
Sean
Thanks to:
Reto Lichtensteiger
Fedor Gnuchev
Bismark Espinoza
Bob Woodward
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