The Men and Mice Suite allows you to work with dynamic zones on BIND and the Windows DNS server.
This section describes how the Men & Mice Suite handles dynamic zones and how to configure your DNS server to allow the program to work with dynamic zones.
Due to the nature of dynamic zones, the Management Console must handle such zones differently from static zones. Below, you will find information on how the software handles dynamic zones compared to static zones.
The zone content is read from disk on the server.
The zone content is retrieved from the server via a zone transfer.
Records can be enabled and disabled. Disabled records are commented out in the zone files.
Disabling records is not possible.
Specifying a TTL value for individual records is optional.
Every record must have a TTL explicitly set.
Every resource record can have a comment associated with it.
Comments are not supported for records.
Check if there is a key already created in /etc/rndc.key (or its equivalent). If there is, simply copy its contents into the file user_before. Then skip the rest of these instructions.
(Re)start named (or signal it with either kill –HUP <pid> or rndc reconfig) in order to have it reload its configuration files.
When you have configured the server, you can change the zone type from static to dynamic by opening the zone options in the Management Console and changing the zone type to dynamic.
As dynamic zones are transferred from the DNS server using a zone transfer, you should make sure that zone transfers are allowed to localhost.
The Men and Mice Management Console can work with dynamic zones on the Windows DNS server, both AD integrated zones and file-based zones.
A new column, Record timestamp, is shown for dynamic zones that are hosted on Windows DNS servers. The Record timestamp column will show the creation time for records that are added dynamically (dynamic records). Static records will not have a record timestamp.
Dynamic zones are transferred from the DNS server using a zone transfer. If you restrict zone transfers from your DNS server, you should make sure that zone transfers are allowed to the IP Address of the DNS server itself.
It is not possible to disable dynamic zones that are hosted on the Windows DNS server. This is the only limitation.