[Pdns-dev] Explicit Notification

[Markus Lauer]

Hi List!

I'm experimenting with a chain of hidden masters.


PDNS (hidden master)   --NOTIFY-->   OPENDNSSEC (hidden master)   --NOTIFY--> 
PUBLIC PRIMARY

(AXFRs the other way round)


Problem is: PDNS notifies only hosts it finds in the NS records of the changed 
zone. I don't know how to loop-in a second hidden master. In BIND there's a 
configuration option for this:

options {
    also-notify { [opendnssecip]; }; // all zones
    notify explicit;
};

(See http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch7/xfer.html#notify)

You can achieve a similar behaviour with PDNS by calling "pdns_control notify-
host" (http://doc.powerdns.com/master.html). This ignores the NS records from 
zone and only notifies the explicit IP.

Is there a way to get automatic explicit notifies?

I think this should not be a huge effort: pdns_control queues the explicit 
notify in pdns. There's a method like notifydomain() which look's up the NS 
entries first and queues a "explicit" notify to the specific NS. Instead of 
automatically calling notifydomain() it should be possible to queue a notify 
to a configured NS directly. This config option could be called something like 
'explicit-notify-hosts' with a remark that these hosts will override NS 
records from zone.

Please see also the blog entry from Jan-Piet Mens: 
http://blog.fupps.com/2010/09/15/hints-on-getting-powerdns-to-use-opendnssec-
for-signing-zones/



Regards,

Markus Lauer.