Bind 9.2.0 & hosts_to_named

[Richard Taft]

Iâ ve been going around and around with this with HP. So I thought Iâ d have people out in the real world have a crack at it.

My current DNS production system is based on a HP N-Class running 11.0. Itâ s currently using BIND 4.9.7. I currently host some static domains, some secondary domains, and my primary internal domain with this and a secondary server running the same version of the software. Whenever I need to update the DNS of my internal domain I add the information (IP & Hostname) to the /etc/hosts file. If Iâ m adding a new Subnet I also ad a â n option line to my param file in /etc/named.data. After I update my hosts file I run a simple little script that runs hosts_to_named â f param from the /etc/named.data directory. Once the new database are created and the new boot.sec.save (created by adding the â z option to the param file) I do a restart on the primary server, then run a rsh to my secondary server to backup its named.boot file and then rcp the boot.sec.save file to the /etc/named.boot file on my secondary server. I then do a rsh and a sig_named restart on the seconday and it does all the zone transfers so that its up-to-date with the primary server. This has been working well for years.

No I need to update to BIND 9.2.0. So I set up a test server and make a copy of all my DNS files from the primary server and get it all working just like the production server. I then download and install the BIND 9.2.0 depot from software.hp.com I run the script to convert my /etc/named.boot to /etc/named.conf I then change to the /etc/named.data directory and run the hosts_to_named script (I have confirmed that this was installed from the depot properly) and I get the following errors at the end of the run when its creating the secondary config files, and the config files are empty.

Now there seems to be two ways I can make this work

1) Delete the /etc/named.conf file. This allows the hosts_to_named script to create both a named.boot file in the /etc/named.data directory and named.conf in the /etc directory. The secondary server files conf.sec & conf.sec.save are also created. The problem is none of the configuration files contain any of the setting for my secondary domains and my static domains or any of my forwarders. Obviously since it couldnâ t read them from the original named.conf file.
2) Remove the â b option from my param file and make sure the named.boot & named.conf file are delete form the /etc/named.data directory. This produces the same results as above but I didnâ t have to delete my named.conf from my /etc directory.

Having everything work seems to depend on the script being able to find and open a named.boot file someplace on the system. It seems to use this file to create the secondary server config files. It makes an accurate copy of the named.conf file in named.boot format only if it makes the named.conf from scratch. The only problem is all resulting files are missing any static data I put in manually. This seems to be a major bug in the way the hosts_to_named script is written.

I have looked for a script called h2n that is written in perl that is the same as the shell script version provided by HP. But I canâ t find a version that supports 9.2.0 of bind. Has anyone found a copy of h2n or better yet, can anyone assist me in fixing the problem with the hosts_to_named script so that it function

[Steven E. Protter]

On my nearly out of production DNS 4.9.7 server we used host_to_named and the related utilities to generate a named database from /etc/hosts

When we went to BIND 9.2.0 we started using zone records and maintaing the data for each domain in those.

Maybe thats a better course of action. It seems host_to_named doesn't hanle your environment.

I will look for the h2n script and post it in later today if I find it.

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