Bind 8.2.2-P5 Mystery - HELP

[Mohammed Ghanawi]

More info ...

The secondary logs the following as an error message:
zoneref: Masters for secondary zone "hct.ac.ae" unreachable

the zone is partiaslly transfered I get a file called db.hct.00312 (which is
no the complete zone)

domain: hct.ac.ae
The primary is 194.170.32.5 Running Bind 8.2.2-p5
The secondary is 194.170.32.11 Running Bind 4.9.4-p1

The main zone file db.hct.ac.ae is the forward lookup zone it quite large,
and is failing to transfer to secondary.
Other zones are all reverse lookup and they are transfer OK.

Although all the reverse lookup zones transfer with no problem, only the
hct.ac.ae zone fails. The zone file on the primary is quite big (9000
lines). If I reduce this down to a couple of hundred lines the secondary
does not fail (But this is not a solution). The secondary starts the
transfer but fails when the file size transfered reaches 64K.

The primary does not have any error messages (I have turned on debugging).

Relevent entries from named.conf on primary for that failing zone:

_________________________________________________________
options {
#
# boot file for name server
#
        directory "/etc/named.db.new";
        transfer-format one-answer;
};

logging {
        category default { default_syslog; default_debug; };
        category panic { default_syslog; default_stderr; };
        category packet { default_debug; };
        category eventlib { default_debug; };
};

# type domain source host/file backup file
zone "." {
        type hint;
        file "root.cache";
};

zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" {
        type master;
        file "db.local";
};

zone "hct.ac.ae" {
        type master;
        file "db.hct";
};

etc ...
______________________________________________________________
Relevent entries from named.boot on secondary for that failing zone:
;
;    boot file for name server
;

directory       /etc/named.db
cache   .       root.cache

; type         domain                                   source
host/file          backup file
primary      0.0.127.in-addr.arpa              db.local
secondary  hct.ac.ae                                194.170.32.5
db.hct
secondary  32.170.194.in-addr.arpa        194.170.32.5
db.194.170.32

etc ...
_______________________________________________________________


Mohammed Ghanawi wrote:

> More mysterious findings .... This is an update on the last problem I
> posted, I hope someone
> knows what the problem is.
>
> Also now the secondary servers which are running Version 4.9.4 of bind,
> are failing on some zones
> as a result, the outside world can not see our domain anymore, since the
> zones have expired.
>
> I just upgraded to bind 8.2.2-P5, and man I am having strange problems
> ...
>
> Every now and then my new bind 8.2.2-P5 named just refuses to resolve
> local
> addresses, it still resolve addresses outside our domain with no
> problem. When this problem happen all clients fail to access any
> Internet
> services. What is more strange, on the server itself I can resolve the
> local domain and remote domain addresses. From the clients I can ping
> machines locally by IP address but not by name, and I can ping remote
> machine both by name and IP address. I tried stopping named and
> restarting but no success, I even rebooted the whole machine. Plus even
> more strange, on any client that refuses to ping a local machine by name
>
> if I run nslookup on that client it connects to the correct DNS server
> and resolves names (from within nslookup) with no problem, once I am out
>
> of nslookup and try to ping local clients by name it fails with the
> message UNKNOWN HOST (This happen to all clients using that DNS server).
>
> After sometime everything is back together and clients starts resolving
> both local and remote hostnames with no problem. There is nothing in the
>
> log files either.
>
> I am running Solaris 2.6
>
> -- Binary/unsupported file stripped by Listar --
> -- Type: text/x-vcard
> -- File: mohammed.ghanawi.vcf
> -- Desc: Card for Mohammed Ghanawi