Thursday, November 25, 2010

Zone Not Loaded - Linux to Windows

I am running a couple dozen websites on a Linux server (Pigpen) as primary DNS and a Windows server 2008 (Linus) as secondary. A while back I noticed that Linus had stopped updating zones automatically when I made a change on Pigpen.

This has been a minor annoyance. All I have had to do is copy the ~.DNS file from /etc/bind on Pigpen to c:\windows\system32\bind on Linus. Still, I had to remember to do it whenever I make a change, so on Thanksgiving day when things were quiet I determined to find the cause and fix it.

Google found me a LOT of possible reasons, but not the one I needed. After examining Syslog here's what I found that fixed it: Windows uses TCP to get zone updates. The rest of the world, apparently, uses UDP.

So I changed

UFW ALLOW 53/udp

to

UFW ALLOW 53

and it works.

Hope this helps, if you are having the same problem.

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