[Pdns-users] Understanding powerdns zone id and tinydns backend

[subscryer at gmail.com]

Hello everyone,
I'm new to powerdns, I have switched from tinydns because of issues with 
recent bind secondaries.
The switch has been really straighforward, at least on the surface, as 
pdns answers every type of query correctly.
I'm using the tinydns backend, I've got a single cdb database, compiled 
from a few different source files.

I'm experiencing some problems.

The first thing I noticed is that I'm unable to send notify to 
secondaries, after some investigation I understood that each zone needs 
to be set to primary for this to happen.
Also, if I try to force it via pdns_control notify I get No such domain 
xxx in our database, despite pdns_control list-zones being flawless.

So, I launched pdnsutil check-all-zones and I discovered that for every 
zone I get:
[Error] Unable to get zone information for zone 'xxx'
Also, for every zone after the first I get:
[Error] Zone ID 4294967295 of 'xxx' in backend tinydns has already been 
used by zone 'firstzone' in backend tinydns.

I've been unable to determine how pdns assigns zone IDs.

Regarding zone IDs I assume I may have to split the database so that 
each zone is in a separate file? This is less than desirable as one nice 
thing about tinydns format is that you define forward and reverse 
records with a single line whenever you need to, keeping things nicely 
in sync. Essentially I'd have to butcher my config files.
Is there a way to assign several zone IDs keeping one source cdb?

Also, I assume that if I migrate from tinydns to, say, sqlite, I may be 
able to run queries on the db to have separate zone IDs even in the case 
that the migration script doesn't handle them in the first place. 
However from what I've read that format will not support per-record 
comments, which I'd rather keep for administrative reasons and a sql db 
is not as "human readable" as a text file (a lesser evil, but still I'd 
avoid it if possible).

This is already relatively long so... I'm all ears. Please correct me if 
what I wrote is wrong.

Thank you very much for your help!