[Techtalk] Bind DNS issues...

[Mary]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006, Carla Schroder wrote:
> Gentoo arbitrarily re-arrangingyour installation is not your fault, and is not 
> acceptable. Shame on Gentoo. I hate when distro maintainers wake up one 
> morning and go "hmm, that old /etc/named.conf is soooo last-milliunnium. Time 
> for a spring cleaning. I'll fling it into an arbitrary yet tasteful 
> directory. If only I could color it mauve."

It is annoying. I believe the usual reasons are:
 1. bringing it in line with some 'standard' (LSB or something)
 2. wanting more than one config file, and not wanting to clutter /etc
    with named.conf.1 named.conf.2 etc

2 is sometimes an OK reason. I don't know how clever Gentoo's packaging
is, but Debian loves to overwrite files for you. The general solution to
this is to provide a "distro default" file that it will clobber on
upgrades (it does ask) and a "local overrides" file that it won't touch
and you can store your local settings in. For BIND it has
/etc/bind/named.conf and /etc/bind/named.conf.local (and one other I
think).

But silently or even semi-silently moving it to a new location and
continuing to "work" is rather naughty. I like it to do one of two
things:
 1. refuse to start if it notices that /etc/named.conf still exists
 2. log copious errors while /etc/named.conf still exists

That way, you don't get this "oh, I left my old config in the old place"
debugging problem, which I had with DHCP once. Could be worth a bug
report Walt.

-Mary