11.4 Incremental Zone Transfer
11.4 Incremental Zone Transfer The Microsoft DNS Server in Windows 2000 supports a new kind of zone transfer. Incremental zone transfer , or IXFR for short, is specified in RFC 1995, and it does exactly what you'd expect based on its name. A traditional zone transfer always transfers the entire contents of a zone, even if only one record has changed. Incremental zone transfers allow a name server to send a list of just the records that have changed since the last zone transfer (whether it was a full or incremental one). This new feature is critical for zones that change frequently. Imagine the scenario with dynamic update: every dynamic update is a change to the zone that requires a zone transfer. Doing a full zone transfer with every small change wastes bandwidth and CPU time. The situation is compounded when the zone being updated and transferred is large. For IXFR to function, the master servers need to keep track of the differences between successive versions of the zone. A secondary requests an incremental zone transfer and presents its current serial number. The master server calculates and sends the changes needed on the secondary to make its version of the zone current. If the master server can't calculate the changes for whatever reasonperhaps the secondary has an old version of the zone and the primary hasn't kept a record of changes that far backthe primary is allowed to say "Sorry, but you've got to accept a full zone transfer." A Microsoft DNS Server acting as a secondary requests an incremental zone transfer by default. If the master server doesn't support incremental zone transfer, the Microsoft DNS Server asks for a standard full zone transfer. A Microsoft DNS Server acting as a primary master stores a record of changes going back several versions. The number of versions the server keeps in memory depends on the zone's size : it keeps 25% of the total number of resource records of the zone, up to a total of 64,000. For example, given a zone of 100 resource records, the server would store changes corresponding to the last 25 versions of the zone. It responds with a full zone transfer instead of an incremental when it doesn't have the necessary information to produce the list of changes to the zone or when the list of changes would be larger than a full zone transfer. Active Directory-integrated zones introduce an extra wrinkle. Any of these zones' authoritative servers can accept a dynamic update for the zone. The change is stored locally and replicated to the other servers using Active Directory. This situation means that different servers can potentially apply changes to the zone in a different order. To maintain a consistent view of changes to a zone, a secondary must always use the same master server. If a particular master server becomes unavailable and a secondary is forced to use another, it automatically requests a full zone transfer for the first transfer from that server to avoid inconsistencies.  |
| | |
Team-Fly  |
| Top |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 154