General questions about failover, config changes and restarting

[S Carr]

On 4 March 2016 at 11:00, James Dore <james.dore at new.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> It’s version 4.2.6 as shipped with SLES12.

So a quick scan of the archives I got this from another thread that
had a similar issue...

<snip>
From: Shawn Routhier <sar at isc.org>
Subject: Re: Primary server stuck in "recovering" on restarts
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 09:57:16 -0700

This is likely caused by our addition of a "gentle shutdown" feature
in 4.2.6 and 4.3.0.
In this we added a signal handler to collect some signals and shut the
serve down
cleanly.  Unfortunately one side effect of this change was to put the
peer into partner-down.

We have backed out this change for 4.2.7 and 4.3.1 (both currently in
beta, if people are
testing them we'd like to hear about your results).

In the meantime if this is the problem you should be able to avoid it
by using a hard kill
such as "kill -9" to stop the process.
</snip>

So looks like you need to upgrade or tweak the init script to 'kill -9'

Steve