IXFR and nsd

[Ted Lindgreen]

[Quoting Robert Martin-Legene, on Feb 16, 10:09, in "Re: IXFR and nsd ..."]

> rsync assumes you have a single zonefile in text format available, if
> nsd has to parse it.

When we set the the requirements for NSD, we did assume that the
zone-information is available in standard zone-file format from
which the NSD-database is built, which in turn is used by our
(mean and lean) daemon process.
It has been discussed a few times, but sofar we feel that this
was and still is a good decision.

> What is recently happening is that the TLDs are starting to not spool
> the entire zone, but only send dynamic updates to the master from their
> authoritative source.

Supporting dynamic updates was a specific non-requirement for NSD at
the time. Later it turned out, that having the daemon to switch
NSD-database was even faster (and certainly simpler and thus less
prone to errors) than trying to update the NSD-database in flight.

Since building the NSD-database is done seperately from running the
daemon we think that dealing with dynamic updates outside the
daemon was and still is a very good decision.

> I think it is becoming increasingly critical for larger TLDs to have
> IXFR, now that they are getting used to it, and subsequently their
> users.

Although we are still not sure that AXFR/IXFR is the best way to
distribute and maintain zone-information between the various
nameservers for important/large zones (like root and TLD), we are
listening to these requests.
If we do implement IXFR support, it will be done, like our AXFR
support, outside the daemon process.  However, we have no plans
(and thus no timescale) on implementing IXFR support yet.

Regards,
-- ted