Migrate DNS from Snow Leopard Server to OS X Server 5.x

I was faced with a DNS migration, but from Snow Leopard Server to Server.app 5.x. There were only 9 zones but there are hundreds of records and Apple provides zero tools to help make this migration easy. But, I found a hack. Now I’m going to say right now that I just found that this worked and YMMV.

First, on your Snow Leopard Server box do an ls /var/named/zones and make a primary zone in Server.app 5.x for every file listed in this directory. Then tarball up all these files and copy them over to your Server.app 5.x machine. One by copy the zones files from this tarball into /Library/Server/named matching the names as you go with some tab-auto-complete action.

For example, if the zone files in your Snow Leopard server are:


db.1.5.10.in-addr.arpa.zone.apple
db.mgmt.clientname.com.zone.apple
db.remote.clientname.com.zone.apple
db.backup.clientname.com.zone.apple
db.lan.clientname.com.zone.apple


Then you would issue the following commands:


sudo cp db.1.5.10.in-addr.arpa.zone.apple /Library/Server/named/db.1.5.10.in-addr.arpa
sudo cp db.lan.clientname.com.zone.apple /Library/Server/named/db.lan.clientname.com
sudo cp db.mgmt.clientname.com.zone.apple /Library/Server/named/db.mgmt.clientname.com
sudo cp db.remote.clientname.com.zone.apple /Library/Server/named/db.remote.clientname.com
sudo cp db.backup.clientname.com.zone.apple /Library/Server/named/db.backup.clientname.com