Decompiling zonefiles / 2019-08-13

The authoritive nameserver on the homeserver 2017 is using bind9 version 9.10.3 (from Devuan packages). I wanted to look up something in a secondary zonefile and noticed it was a binary file.

Using 'file' to determine what to do next wasn't much help:

$ file secondary.domain-zone
secondary.domain-zone: data

But a search found an explanation at Reading a binary zone file from Bind - The Linux Page. With named-compilezone a zonefile can be 'uncompiled' to a readable file.

$ /usr/sbin/named-compilezone -f raw -F text -o /tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt secondary.domain secondary.domain-zone
zone secondary.domain/IN: loaded serial 2018122523
dump zone to /tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt...done
OK
$ file /tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt
/tmp/secondary.domain-zone.txt: ASCII text

Which is a readable zonefile.