We have split DNS set up for our domain, which causes internal clients to resolve different DNS records from external clients.
As it is right now, the two zones are managed completely separately. For records that differ between internal and external, it's no problem, but for everything else, all of the records have to be duplicated in both places. Most CNAME records, MX records, SPF records, and some A records all need to be entered and maintained in both places.
While this isn't inherently unacceptable, data duplication like this is less than ideal from a design perspective. I feel like ideally, the internal nameserver would simply forward results from the external nameserver, but allow for us to override or add additional records. While it looks like I could use a designated forwarder (like dnsmasq) to do something like this, the flat file configuration would make it difficult to sell the idea to the rest of the team.
Aside from that, the best solution I've been able to come up with consists of PowerDNS with a MySQL backend and web interface. This makes it fairly easy to add a zone and root A record for each sub-domain we'd like to override (e.g. www.example.com), which means other records on the root domain (e.g. example.com) will still be forwarded from the external nameserver.
That still seems like I'm straying kind of far from the norm for something that's supposedly very common, right? Is there a cleaner way to manage Split DNS without maintaining duplicate records? Or is there something I'm missing?
