"Server Failed" errors

[Philip J. Koenig]

Recently I've been getting a lot of "server failed" responses
when trying to do a reverse lookup of addresses on my subnet. 
(170.1.21.192/28)  Have tried this from different locations,
the problem is intermittent.

Although I use MS DNS for NT (recently applied SP5) as the 
primary for forward lookups, the authoritative DNS hosts 
for the in-addr.arpa. zone are my ISP's 2 unix/bind-based 
machines.

I can't seem to come up with a debug setting for nslookup or
dig that actually shows me what hosts are being contacted to
resolve a query or success/failure of contacting them - all 
I see is an "answer" of "Server Failed" or "SERVFAIL".  

Sometimes if I do a bunch of queries it seems like the 
resolvers "wake up" and either populate their cache or
figure out which host to forward the queries to and then
everything works -- for a while.

Can anyone suggest how to pursue troubleshooting this further?

Somewhat unrelated question: is there an easy way to 
ascertain which version of BIND or other DNS server
software a particular server is running?

TIA,


Phil





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Philip J. Koenig         The Electric Kahuna Organization          [see below]
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