New Ways to Make Changes
In Chapter 4 we described the traditional method for making changes to zone data and how those changes are propagated: any changes to a zone are made on the zone’s primary server, and secondary servers periodically poll the primary to check if the zone has changed. If the zone has new information, the secondaries perform a zone transfer to download the entire zone. This scheme is effective but inefficient and it’s not suitable for every environment. The DNS console is great for making changes by hand, but what about automated changes (say you want to have a program change information in a zone)? It can also be frustrating to wait for all the secondaries to be updated with the new information. And for a large zone, it’s a waste of time and bandwidth to transfer the entire zone if only a single record was added or deleted.
The next three sections describe relatively recent changes to the DNS protocol called dynamic update, NOTIFY, and incremental zone transfer that work together to address these issues. The Microsoft DNS Server implements all three.
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