Netware Primary DNS, Linux Secondary

I second the second (and third...) 6.5 server.  You should have at least 2 (3 is recommended) just for eDirectory redundancy/fault tolerance.

DNS is stored in eDirectory so you don't have to set up zone transfers between two NetWare DNS servers - just designate one as primary and the other as secondary.  Non-authoritative cache is not stored in eDirectory, just the DNS zone records.  Any NetWare server in your tree configured as a DNS server can be made primary without skipping a beat.  >That's< fault-tolerance!

If you're unsure on how NetWare 6.x licensing works let us know and we'll help you through the details.

It's as free as Ubuntu yet is as manageable as NetWare ;)

Regarding the Question itself, in the DNS/DHCP Java console (or in iManager with the DNS/DHCP plugins) you go into the zone properties and add the IP and netmask of the secondary server for the zone in the Zone Out Filter.  Then go to the SOA information tab and make note of the zone master, interval values and serial number.  You may need to set some values to match in the bind info on your ubuntu name daemon config.

PGM:

I only need one NW server. It runs file services, groupwise and iprint. My firewall / spam filter / proxy cache all run on linux (because spam and content filters that run on netware are EXPENSIVE and on linux they are free and IMHO better). My Win2k3 server has edirectory installed for replication (although it doesn't have any other Novell software to take advantage of it).

Since I don't have any use for another NW server, it doesn't make sense for me to build one just to handle dns. Now, don't get me wrong, I LOVE the edir integrated dns concept (I wish they could have brought that over to SLES, it may have been the deciding factor for me when picking my distro), but the only thing that SLES could do (that I was interested in at least) that ubuntu couldn't is edirectory support.

ShineOn:

I am familiar with how the edir integrated dns & dhcp works as well as the licensing model (we have an SLA so pretty much anything goes). At one time I did have my firewall / proxy as an NW/BM box. It was unreliable at best and the content filtering plugin was outrageously expensive. When I had this setup, my dns & dhcp worked flawlessly. Fortunately I learned linux over the last couple months and migrated all that stuff over to ubuntu (which now works like a dream). I kind of want to cheat the system though by managing my dns through the java console, but have it propagate to my ubuntu server to be used as my secondary (which IMHO should be out of the box functionality for SLES).

I am at a different location today, but I will be back monday to try it out. I will let you know how it goes then.

Thanks for both of your responses.

-jkorz

On the other thing, if you have a spare desktop-class PC with 512MB RAM and a fast P3 or a P4 or the equivalent AMD, you could easily set up a second NetWare server on it.  If you then got a cheap NAS device to store your user data on and used iSCSI to connect the 2 servers to it, you could failover-cluster them for high-availability of most, if not all of the services you're running on your lone NetWare server...

Just sayin'...

And, if you've got upgrade protection with your license agreement, you should be able to upgrade to OES and do OES/Linux on your secondary failover cheapie-box, 'cause OES/NetWare and OES/Linux can be set up as a failover cluster with each other.

Just sayin'...

;)