PowerDNS (pdns) and Supermasters

After spending an hour trying to find out why my slave didn’t attempt to sync with my supermaster server (my domains were set to MASTER, axfr worked from the slave, etc..), I came across the fact that even though your server is authorative and will handle requests, it will not pretend to be an actual MASTER server unless master=yes is set in the configuration file.

One reload and suddenly all the domains synced magically.

Do check that one if you’re not seeing any notify-requests or any entries in your logfiles at all when updating or requesting a sync (through pdns_control).

DNS and Authorative Answers

Just had to debug a little issue with a domain that were not considered authorative from our DNS server. The SOA records were there as they should be, and it referred the correct name server in the SOA record. A bit of searching at Google later turned up the cause of the issue; the name server did not have an NS entry for the domain. To be considered authorative, a domain server has to provide an NS entry for the domain too. As I do DNS stuff only a couple of minutes each year, details like that happily slides away to the darkest corners of my mind.

So to sum it up: Get your SOA and your NS records straight, and you can be authorative all day long! Authorative like it’s 1999!