Migrating Windows DNS to Linux BIND

Recently I have encountered several people who were trying to do DNS migrations between operating systems for various reasons. I thought it would be nice to put together a good tutorial on this. If you search around you will find other answers, most of which tell you to pull the DNS text file from a windows machine and copy it over to Linux. That works if you have a non-active directory integrated DNS zone and the file is already there. I wouldn't suggest trying to convert an AD integrated zone that is used in production to a primary non-AD integrate zone just to do a migration. There are two good ways to get a zone file that BIND can use.

1) Export the zone from windows.
dnscmd [dns server name] /exportzone [zone name] [file name]
This command will export all the zone records into a text file and put it in the %windir%\system32\dns folder.

2) On your Linux machine, create secondary zones for your Windows zones. On the Windows machine, allow zone transfer to the Linux machine. Once the transfer is done, you will have a text copy of the zone file that you can modify and reuse as a master zone.

Example Linux machine 10.1.3.2 and windows machine 10.1.3.10

In both cases, you will need to do some editing to the zone file. You need to update the SOA information and the NS record

Change these values to the name of your BIND server. Place the zone file where BIND can read it, and update your named.conf or related include file to host the zone as a master. Reload BIND and you will be hosting DNS there.

There are always more considerations to a migration than this. You need to consider what IP addresses the clients use for nameservers. If they were pointing to the server you are migrating away from, you may want to do a IP address swap on your servers as a last step of the transfer. Besides clients, you need to be concerned with domain name registration services pointing to the appropriate servers that manage your registered domain names, as well as any DNS forwarders being used. If you are using dynamic dns and you have a lot of registrations from DHCP clients, migrating them as-is would cause their records to now become static.  So you want to look at cleaning up your zone file of this type of entry prior to migration if you want to continue with dynamic dns in the BIND server.  Another big concern is for Active Directory environments. It is not recommended to go away from Microsoft DNS when using active directory due to the large number of records that are required to make that function properly. Failing to keep up with all of the manual changes can greatly impact your AD environment. One method to help avoid some of the headache would be to use both, and leave the _msdcs zone on your windows system. This will require some delegations to be put in place on the BIND server.