[TriLUG] named.conf

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Steve Hoffman wrote:

>This is a question for all the bind experts out there.  
>
>I have a working installation of bind that handles roughly 200
>domains.  with every restart of named /var/log/messages grows by
>nearly 500 lines...not a big deal, but makes reading the logs a pain
>in the butt.  I'd like to send the named logs to /var/log/named
>instead but haven't been able to do it yet.  I've RTFM and googled
>quite a bit, but neither has helped
>  
>
First off, let me say that you're going about this the wrong way.  You 
really shouldn't restart the server on any regular basis, *especially* 
for a server with 200+ domains, which probably serves hundreds of 
clients or more.  Presumably, you're doing a restart when you update 
domains, or perhaps when you update named.conf.  This is bad because 
when you restart the server, not only are you causing all of this 
enormous load on the server, and filling the logs, but you're throwing 
out the cache that's been built up by the server, which is the best 
performance benefit for a DNS server. 

So, to resolve your problem, when you make a configuration change to a 
zone file, use `rndc reload example.com`, or if you're using views, 
`rndc reload <domain> in <viewname>`.  If you make a configuration 
change to named.conf, use `rndc reconfig`.  These much-less-intensive 
commands will reload only the individual zone reference that you mean 
to, or in the case of a reconfig, only things which have been changed in 
the named.conf.

For details on the actual question you asked about, see Jon's 
informative post.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner
BIND stickler extraordinaire  :)