Chapter 10. Migrating to PDNS

Before migrating to PDNS a few things should be considered.

PDNS is not a recursing nameserver on its own

If PDNS receives a question for which it is not authoritative, it can't go out on the net to figure out an answer. However, because many installations are expected to be both authoritative and recursing, PDNS can use a separate recursing backend to provide non-authoritative answers. See Chapter 11 for more details.

PDNS does not operate as a 'slave' server with all backends

Only the PostgreSQL backend has, of version 1.99.9, the ability to act as a slave.

Wildcard CNAMEs do not work as they do in Bind

Wildcard CNAMEs are a controversial non-standard feature of Bind and perhaps other nameservers. As yet, PDNS does not support these because of this controversy - discussion with IETF people has shown that it is not guaranteed that CNAME wildcard records will always work well.

However, as this is a popular feature, it will be added soon.

To migrate, the zone2sql tool is provided.

10.1. Zone2sql

Zone2sql parses Bind named.conf files and zonefiles and outputs SQL on standard out, which can then be fed to your database.

Zone2sql understands the Bind master file extension '$GENERATE' and will also honour '$ORIGIN' and '$TTL'.

By default, zone2sql outputs code suitable for the mysqlbackend, which can also be read by PostgreSQL incidentally. The following commands are available: