Multi-Master Clustering?

[monstermuffin]

Great to see cluster support added to Technitium, awesome work and much needed for larger deployments, thanks to all that helped.

I have a use case however that I don't believe will work with the clustering feature but want to check first.

I have multiple sites in my homelab, each site has a Technitium server for DNS and DHCP. Each site is authoritative to the same zone, internal.x.x.x. I do this because I want clients to be able to resolve any other client regardless of which site the client is in, without needing the fqdn or to remember which site a VM/service is in.

In the past I wrote an absolutely awful script that attempts to sync all records between the servers so all servers actually independently and has their own records, either from DHCP or static and also the other servers addresses. The script tried to keep track of what was created where, sync and remove records as required. Unfortunately whilst this worked for a bit it started majorly messing up and I just switched it off and haven't had the chance to revisit it.

Is there any way I can get clustering to work in this way? Every server needs to be active as it is the DNS authority of that zone for that site, and the DHCP server, but also needs to be able to sync from the other servers.

My understanding is that zone transfers won't work for this use case, but happy to be shown otherwise.

Cheers!

[ShreyasZare]

Thanks for asking. The clustering feature helps sync all DNS related config to all nodes in the cluster but the zones part is still independent on each DNS server. The clustering feature only adds a cluster catalog zone using which you can sync all your zones across all nodes in the cluster. So, it does not solve the issue you have here.

I guess, instead of using the same named zone across all sites, having one primary for each site with site specific name, and then having secondary zones for each of them on each of the other sites would be much better.

Your clients do not need to remember what site a client resides on since this can be solved using DHCP server's Domain Search List option. You just need to enter all the site zone domain names in the search list in DHCP for all sites and the clients will then check for a given name for each of the domains in the list.

For example, if you use "ping clientx" on any client, it will use the domain search list any try out "clientx.site1", "clientx.site2", etc. till it gets a valid IP address in response.

I guess that should work for your scenario.

[epoch-philosophy]

I do hope in the future you would consider sharing a clustered DNS Zone. For many, they use DNS on a small local network and only have use for a single zone. In a cluster, being able to sync various DNS records without adding to each DNS Node would be great.

[ShreyasZare]

@epoch-philosophy Thanks for the suggestion. I am not really following it though. With cluster setup, you just need to add your primary zone to the cluster catalog zone and the sync is done automatic. There is no additional config required to make it work.