CNAME problem

[Tariq Rahman]

Hello,

I'm having a small bit of trouble with regards to my CNAME records.
I'm running BIND 8.2 /  RedHat Linux 6.0 on a Compaq DP2000 PII -
266Mhz w/96MB RAM

My company is currently using the DNS that comes with Netware.  It
does what it needs to do, but it's somewhat unstable.  We're also
using non-standard names with underscores for many of our internal
hosts.  The Netware server is a Compaq DP2000 P166 w/32MB RAM running
Netware 4.11a

I'd like to replace the current DNS with the Linux box.  For the
migration, I was thinking of creating legal A entries, using hyphens
instead of underscores.  Then create the underscored hosts as CNAME
entries pointing back to the A entries for backward compatibility.
Once the server names are changed to legal hostnames, then I would
phase out the CNAME entries.

Sample:

; host
server-1	IN A	192.168.x.x
; alias
server_1	IN A	server-1

The error message I get in the log is that: *

"server_1.<domain>.com has CNAME and other data (invalid)"
" db.<zone>:185:server_1.<domain>.com: CNAME and OTHER data error"

* where <domain> is my internal domain name and <zone> is my internal
zone name

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.  I've tried using the full
canonical name for both the alias and translated host for the CNAME
entry, to no avail.  I've tried setting the "check-names warn" under
the zone entry for my domain in /etc/named.conf, and I do get an pass
entry like so in the log:

"owner name "server_1.<domain>.com" IN (primary) is invalid -
proceeding anyway"

However, BIND still gives the preceding error messages anyway.

Any ideas on how to proceed?  Any clues as to what I've done wrong?

TIA

Tariq Rahman