Send DNS NOTIFY to secondaries after every UPDATE

Per RFC 1996, a master that mutates a zone SHOULD notify its
secondaries so they can immediately AXFR rather than wait for their
next SOA-refresh poll. Without this, propagation lag from UPDATE to
public DNS is bounded by the secondary's refresh interval (300s for
us) — which is borderline for ACME validation timing.

New Corefile directive:
    notify <host[:port]> [<host[:port]>...]

Targets accept bare hostnames (port 53 default), host:port, or
[ipv6]:port. The same list applies to every zone in the rfc2136
block.

Implementation: fire-and-forget UDP per target, each in its own
goroutine, capped by a 2s timeout. The UPDATE response to the client
is never held pending NOTIFY acks (RFC 1996 §4 explicitly decouples
them). Failures log at DEBUG only — a briefly-unreachable secondary
is normal and would otherwise spam logs.

Retires the external scripts/notify-secondaries.py workflow for any
deployment that wires the directive: secondaries now hear about
changes within seconds of the UPDATE landing, no cron or manual
invocation needed.

New tests:
- TestSendNotify_DeliversToTarget — packet arrives, opcode + zone correct
- TestSendNotify_NoTargets_NoCrash — empty list short-circuits
- TestSendNotify_BadTarget_LogsButDoesNotBlock — fire-and-forget timing
- TestNotifyOne_AppendsDefaultPort — host vs host:port normalization
This commit is contained in:
Ryan Malloy 2026-05-23 00:54:45 -06:00
parent 89993ca207
commit 7367401734
6 changed files with 241 additions and 0 deletions

View file

@ -51,6 +51,7 @@ rfc2136 <zone> [<zone>...] {
git-author <name> <email> # optional
rate-limit <burst> <period-seconds> # default 100 / 60s
rate-limit off # disable rate-limit
notify <host[:port]> [<host[:port]>...] # NOTIFY secondaries on every UPDATE
}
```
@ -149,6 +150,34 @@ UPDATE traffic is token-bucket capped per TSIG key. Default 100
UPDATEs per 60 seconds. ACME storms are well within this; anything
beyond is suspicious. Tune via `rate-limit <burst> <period>`.
### NOTIFY to secondaries (optional)
After every successful UPDATE, the plugin can fire DNS NOTIFY (RFC
1996) to a list of secondary servers. This collapses propagation lag
from "up to the secondary's SOA refresh interval" (often 300s) to
"a few seconds" — secondaries that receive NOTIFY do an immediate SOA
poll and AXFR if changed.
Configure with the `notify` directive:
```
rfc2136 example.com {
zones-dir /zones
tsig-key ...
notify ns2.example.com ns3.example.com 216.218.130.2
}
```
Semantics:
- Targets may be `host`, `host:port`, or `[ipv6]:port`. Default port is 53.
- Fire-and-forget: each target gets its own goroutine with a 2s timeout.
The UPDATE response to the client is **not** held pending NOTIFY acks
(RFC 1996 §4 decouples them).
- Failures log at DEBUG only — a briefly-unreachable secondary is
normal and would otherwise spam.
- Missed NOTIFY = no harm; secondary catches up on its own refresh.
- The same target list applies to every zone in the block.
## Building
This plugin is consumed by a custom CoreDNS build via `plugin.cfg`: