Migrating Bind / Microsoft DNS to PowerDNS – part 1

Currently I’m working with my colocation provider GetHost on a new DNS platform for both of us.

Currently I’m using Microsoft DNS for my DNS and GetHost is currently using Bind for her DNS.

The task is, creating a new DNS platform, that is robust, and reliable.
PowerDNS is chosen to do the job. The only thing is, we need to migrate 2 systems into 1 completely different system. Given the fact that Microsoft DNS is cross-compatible with Bind.

second: The DirectAdmin Webhosting platform requires to one-sided synchronise, so newly created domains needs to be pushed into the PowerDNS database.

With those objectives in mind, the zone2sql migration executable from PowerDNS wasn’t an option. It’ll create everytime a new SQL dump, and the PowerDNS platform will also provide standalone DNS.

Since zone2SQL wasn’t an option I decided to crerate my own parsing software. Microsoft DNS and Bind uses fairly the same zone scheme (only some minor (nasty) differences).
After allmost 1 full day of tinkering, I managed to convert both type of zone files into 1 array which I can read and import it into the database.

Next step is importing the array into the PowerDNS database, which I will blog about later.

Yours truly