nsd users - Dec 2023 - Question on slave

Hello,

I am switching from djbdns and have a (probably dumb) question before 
going live with nsd:

When syncing between master and slaves, am I supposed to see new files 
appear in the slave's "zonesdir" directory? Because, as you might 
expect, I see nothing here. Is this behavior normal? From what I 
understand, the slave "caches" the data in /var/lib/nsd/nsd.db
(I'm
using debian).

What I have done is create the whole master config (with all the zones 
and notify+provide-xfr fields) and, on the slave, only defined the 
"server" part of the config and, for each zone, the allow-notify and 
request-xfr fields.

When, on the slave, I execute "nsd-control force_transfer gosane.fr" i
just get an "ok" message.

Then "nsd-control zonestatus gosane.Fr" spits out:
zone:?? gosane.fr
 ?????? state: ok
 ?????? served-serial: "2023110103 since 2023-12-04T12:39:04"
 ?????? commit-serial: "2023110103 since 2023-12-04T12:39:04"
 ?????? wait: "80812 sec between attempts"

That looks fine to me (the slave had no way to know the serial). Also 
querying the slave directly gives me the right answers.

Can anyone confirm that it is working as expected?

Thanks for your help,

JC

On 04/12/2023 13:47, Jean-Christophe Boggio via nsd-users wrote:

Hi Jean-Christophe,
> When syncing between master and slaves, am I supposed to see new files 
> appear in the slave's "zonesdir" directory? Because, as you
might
> expect, I see nothing here. Is this behavior normal? From what I 
> understand, the slave "caches" the data in /var/lib/nsd/nsd.db
(I'm
> using debian).
By default, NSD doesn't write out zone files on the secondary. It stores 
all the data in nsd.db, as you've observed.

You can make NSD write out zone files, by setting the option 
"zonesfile-write" to a number above 0, and setting
"zonefile" to
something like "<zonename>.zone" for each secondary zone. NSD
will then
write out changed zones to plain text files. This is in *addition* to 
saving the zone data in nsd.db.

Alternatively, you can disable the database altogether by setting 
"database" to the empty string. Then, NSD will not create nsd.db, and 
will instead write out zone files every hour (this is for efficiency, to 
prevent too many disk writes on a busy secondary server).

Note that the "database" option is deprecated, and will go away with
the
upcoming 4.8.0 release. So you should probably disable it in your config 
too.

Regards,
Anand Buddhdev