Zone Transfer, question

[Barry Margolin]

In article <a2nh3d$sd7 at pub3.rc.vix.com>, wmr <rmeisner at meridia.org> wrote:
>
>Background: W2K primary dns; HP-UX 11.0 secondary dns running BIND
>4.9.7
>My Question/Problem:
>From my HP-UX syslog file I have this:
>==========================================
>Jan 23 03:58:51 po named[712]: NSTATS 1011776331 1010090173 Unknown=27
>A=1081746
>7 NS=1331 CNAME=1615 SOA=21752 PTR=1594879 HINFO=1 MX=154595 TXT=4
>AAAA=3262 33=
>30920 38=1819 AXFR=4 ANY=408091
>Jan 23 03:58:51 po named[712]: XSTATS 1011776331 1010090173 RR=1568855
>RNXD=2254
>65 RFwdR=1205324 RDupR=2142 RFail=11123 RFErr=0 RErr=1116 RAXFR=4
>RLame=112591 R
>Opts=0 SSysQ=128484 SAns=11687005 SFwdQ=1240842 SDupQ=1359134 SErr=0
>RQ=13048489
> RIQ=0 RFwdQ=1240842 RDupQ=228061 RTCP=1154 SFwdR=1205324 SFail=99619
>SFErr=173
>SNaAns=6574681 SNXD=3242659
>===========================================
>Which appears to be a zone transfer from the primary. However, the
>refresh rate is set on the primary for three hours. This is appearing
>in the syslog Every Hour. So I am not sure if this is the 'zone
>status' that is referred to in the O'Reilly DNS book or if this is a
>zone transfer.

This is not a zone transfer, it's the hourly statistics message.  See the
section titled "Understanding the BIND Statistics".

>If it is a zone transfer, the admin for that server tells me the retry
>is set to
>one hour, is this a retry? How can I tell? Does that mean that there
>is a problem with the zone transfer?
>Thanks very much in advance for any assistance!!

Zone transfers are only performed if the zone's serial number has
increased.  The Refresh interval specifies how often the slave checks the
serial number to see if it has changed.  If there's an error while querying
for the serial number or while trying to perform the zone transfer, it then
switches to using the Retry interval.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
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