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Sergio_Harnais_'s avatar
Sergio_Harnais_
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Jan 19, 2008

Automating Zonerunner Changes

OK, we moved to F5 GTM products because we were told that just about everything we used to do in the past we could, come to find out that it was a load of you know what. So now I am coming to this forum to ask anybody out there if they know of a solution or use a solution to these 2 issues that are driving me nuts. I realize that F5 does not support these type of issues but I figured what the heck.

 

 

Issue 1 - When we ran the old version 4.x, we used to run straight BIND for DNS resolution. Doing this gave us the ability to cheat a little bit in DNS. We have customers that buy various variations of their domains, meaning they will buy boston.com, boston.org and boston.net. What we used to do is set the named.conf file to use the same zone file file, so that way when there was a change to a records we only had to change it in one location. Does anyone know if there is a way to actually do this with Zonerunner? For whatever reason F5 does not support this and I would think that this would be a HUGE feature.

 

 

Issue 2 - OK this is a personal need. We have a very strict change management procedure and our change window is only on Sundays. Obviously, I love nothing more than waking up on a Sunday and have to log on to my network. In our previous version we had CRON jobs that would allow us to stage our changes and then run them have a script that ran them during the change window and did a resolution test on the in ternet to ensure that the changes went through. I am will to put the time in to create a new script that would work on GTM but am not able to get an answer from F5 when I ask what the sequence of services stopping and starting when you make a change in ZOnerunner. I find it hard to believe that noone know. The system must HAVE to stop and start some service(s) to reload the named.conf file. If someone has a CRON that will do it, don't get me wrong I will use yours but..............I NEED SOMETHING!!!!!

 

 

 

Thanks to all in advance for you suggestions/help,

 

Serge
management
monitoring
  • The_Bhattman's avatar
    The_Bhattman
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Mar 21, 2008
    Issue 1 - F5 won't support this because it's something that doesn't come out of thier tech stack. Simply is someone starts to use BIND and DNS on thier own. Your best bet is to put in a feature release with F5.

     

     

    Issue 2 - I asked F5 support the same question about this quite some time ago for writing a script for a different reason, this is what they told me on the sequence.

     

    bigstart stop named;bigstart stop zrd;bigstart start named;bigstart start zrd

     

     

    Of course this causes a slight distruption, but that is what they said will gaurentee the changes.

     

     

    /CB