DNS master and NOTIFY

[Haim Dimermanas <dudle@linuxroot.org>]

Hi all,

 I own the domain dudle.net and I signed up with secondary.com to get
secondary (slave) name servers for this domain. On the master, I use
potato with bind 8.2.3-0.potato.1 (the current stable bind package).

 My problem is the following : the master sends NOTIFY request to the
slaves for that zone every 8 seconds (sometimes 10 sec, sometimes 4
sec).

 Not only it makes the logs grow like hell but it creates useless
traffic. For the log part, I inserted the following line in my
named.conf:

logging {
        category notify { null; };
};

 It does the trick as far as syslog is concerned.

 From the DNS and Bind book (O'Reilly), chapter 10.2 :

  DNS NOTIFY works like this: when a primary master name server notices
  a change to data in a zone, it sends a special request to all of the
  slave servers for that zone. It determines which servers are the
slaves
  for the zone by looking at the list of NS records in the zone and 
  taking out the one that points to the name server listed in the first 
  record-specific field in the zone's SOA record as well as the local
host.

 The thing is, my zone file doesn't change every 10 seconds! I don't
understand why named sends the NOTIFY like that.

First, the entry in the named.conf :

zone "dudle.net" {
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/db.dudle.net";
        allow-transfer {
            key 1287.2552.nominum.;
        };
};

Note that I can add the line "notify no;" to this zone declaration. In
this case, the master won't send the NOTIFY all the time, it won't even
send them when it should.

Second, the actual zone file (just the SOA and NS entries) :

$TTL 20M
dudle.net.         IN SOA      ns1.linuxroot.org. root.dudle.net. (
                                        2001042307      ; serial
                                        40M             ; refresh
                                        20M             ; retry
                                        1W              ; expiry
                                        20M )           ; minimum
@               IN      NS      ns1.linuxroot.org.
@               IN      NS      ns2.linuxroot.org.
@               IN      NS      ns1.secondary.com.
@               IN      NS      ns2.secondary.com.

Last, the log entries (in /var/log/syslog) :

16:25:16 named[29325]: Sent NOTIFY for "dudle.net IN SOA 2001042308"
(dudle.net); 2 NS, 2 A
16:25:16 named[29325]: Received NOTIFY answer (AA) from 198.133.199.3
for "dudle.net IN SOA"
16:25:16 named[29325]: Received NOTIFY answer (AA) from 198.133.199.4
for "dudle.net IN SOA"

And I see that stuff happening between 10 and 15 times a minute.

If anyone has a clue, I am listening. I will try to install bind from
source to see if it's a debian specific problem but if you already know
... help!

Haim.  

-- 
Whatthehellhashappenedtomydamnspacebar?!?!?