BIND9 - How to change ZONE-Info on secondary NS if primary is down?

Question

I have a primary (master) and a secondary (slave) BIND9 DNS on DEBIAN9. See full config here: old Post

root@server1:/etc/bind# named -v
BIND 9.10.3-P4-Debian <id:ebd72b3>

On my secondary NS (Nameserver) my zonefile /etc/bind/forward.my-domain.com is not readable.

I get something like: ^@^@^@^B^@^@^@^A[ p*^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

If my primary NS is going down the secondary server keeps the DNS tasks. Resolving works fine. How can I add new DNS enries until primary is back? It could also happens that primary can't be restored...

Related: https://serverfault.com/a/775027/183318 – Håkan Lindqvist Oct 18 '18 at 12:20 — Håkan Lindqvist, Oct 18 '18 at 12:20
Also see https://kb.isc.org/docs/aa-00608 – Jacob Evans Oct 18 '18 at 13:53 — Jacob Evans, Oct 18 '18 at 13:53

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 18 '18 at 12:19

With BIND 9.9.x, the slave zone files are now saved in a default raw binary format. This was done to improve performance, but at the sacrifice of being able to easily view the contents of the files.

You can change this with the command:

zone "example.com" {
    masterfile-format text;
    ...
};

See also this link [wesmo.com] or the official documentation [isc.org].

BIND9 - How to change ZONE-Info on secondary NS if primary is down?

1 Answers1