Migrating a lot of zones from Microsoft DNS to BIND

In my last post, I gave some solutions to migrating zones from Microsoft DNS to BIND dns zones. If you have a lot of zones, you may be wondering if there is an easy way to run these steps on all of them to migrate the whole configuration. Well with dnscmd and some basic scripting, that is just adding a few more minutes of work.

When you want to see all of your zones:

dnscmd [dnsserver] /enumzones

will list out every zone on the server. The format needs some work though, and you will need to ignore the header and footer output for the command. The rest comes out in the format of Zone Type Partition Options, with no standardization to the whitespacing between them. Since the zone happens to be what we need, we can easily extract that and use it for follow on commands.

If we want to export our zone's to files, we can try this in powershell:

$zones = dnscmd $dnsserver /enumzones
for ($i = 7; $i -lt ($zones.length -3); $i++) {
$zonename = $zones[$i].substring(1)
$zonename = $zonename.substring(0,$zonename.indexof(" "))
$file = $zonename[$i] + ".txt"
dnscmd $dnsserver /exportzone $zonename $file
}

This will go through all the output, strip out the zone names and export them all to a text file named after the zone name. You could use this same method as a way to backup records if you have issues with them being deleted, or zones going missing. Here I started at the 7th line of output, which should bypass all of the headers and ignore the first zone, which will likely be the "." zone. You can check where you want to start by looking at the lines of the $zone array before doing a loop. We end 3 lines short of the end of the output to skip the footer information.

Alternatively if you were to go with the secondary zone on BIND method, you could use dnscmd to set up the allow zone transfer and provide the BINDS server's IP. While doing this and the above example, you could even throw in extra output to file using the zone name to build all of the BIND config file's entries for the new zones (primary or secondary).

In any case, to use dnscmd to set an IP for zone transfers:

dnscmd [dnsservername] /zoneresetsecondaries /Securelist [secondary dns server ip]

If you are running this on a lot of zones and you don't want to do this to all of them, find another method. This will reset the existing settings on the zone.

These examples are just a few ways to do this. There may be some existing powershell cmdlets available that will accomplish some of these tasks. For obtaining a list of zones, and better filtering/handling of them, you could also take a look at doing this with: Get-wmiobject -namespace root\microsoftdns -class microsoftdns_zone -computer [remote dns server name].