DNS zone transfer...

[Rockhopper]

Hi

I am trying to migrate a whole bunch of domain names from a BIND8 DNS server to a Plesk server so clients can manage their own DNS records.

As a test I setup test.com on the plesk server, enabled DNS and set Plesk as a slave DNS server with my BIND DNS server as it's master.

I enabled zone transfers on my BIND server and that all works fine - Plesk correctly zone transfer's all the records from the BIND server to itself, I have verified this in the domain names config file in /var/named/run-root/var.

However I now want to change the domain name on the Plesk server so that it is the master record but when I click 'Switch DNS Service Mode' it just wipes the records it has transferred in and replaces it with the default zone template.

Is there a way to convert from slave to master without wiping the existing records?

Thanks
Rob

 

[Rockhopper]

Okay - In case anyone else stumbles across this post with the same question - In short the answer is NO!

For additional reference:

http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=90174&highlight=DNS+zone

Basically if Plesk is the SLAVE it will transfer the zone file using BIND and just use a static zone file, I am guessing it will periodicly refresh this as DNS does.

If the Plesk server is the MASTER, the zone file is generated (presumably each time a change is made) from Plesk's internal database so when you change from slave to master it will delete the transferred zone and write a new zone from what it has stored in the database.

There is no means (as far as I can see) to parse a transferred zone file into Plesks database.

So in conclusion the only way I can see for you to migrate a large number of zone files from a standalone BIND server (or any other DNS server) into Plesk is:

- To write your own script/s that will parse a zone file/s and write it into the Plesk database via the command line:

http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PPP9/Doc/en-US/plesk-9.5-unix-cli/

-OR-

- To write your own script/s that will parse a zone file/s and write it into the Plesk database via the XML API:

http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PPP9/Doc/en-US/plesk-9.3-api-rpc-guide/


Rob