[dns-operations] FreeBSD and the slaving of the root zone

[Emilio Perea]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 09:54:05AM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 05:05:48PM -0500,
>  Emilio Perea <eperea at walkereng.com> wrote 
>  a message of 24 lines which said:
> 
> > Being at the smaller end of the scale, I transfer the root zone
> > (from f.root-servers.net) once a month
> 
> Which means that new TLD (like ".asia" or ".travel") may be delayed by
> two weeks on average? As an user, I would find it difficult to
> swallow.

As would I.  .asia was mentioned on this list on the 3rd of May.  Purely
by coincidence, my cron job is set to 0300 on the 3rd of each month, so
it was already included.  If it had not been, there would have been a
gap until I heard of a new tld and did another zone transfer.  I'm not
sure when .travel was activated, but when I first heard about it it was
already in "my" root.

I assume that if you had been one of my unfortunate users you would have
mentioned it at the time? 

> > and rsync it to a half-dozen other resolvers.  In the three years
> > I've done this I haven't run into any problems due to stale data,
> 
> Do note that it is a very different setup than the one discussed
> here. Yours seems very brittle: one day, cron will fail and noone will
> notice before months.

I know it's brittle, so I try to be careful.  If the cron job fails, I
would know it the same morning.

I'm not advocating that anybody else do this (much less make it an OS
default. :-)  It is simply a method that I've found helpful in our small
network.