HP gethostbyaddr errors

[James Hall-Kenney]

All,

We have a customer who is having trouble with BIND 8.2.2-P5 on HP-UX 11.

They use router management software (Spectrum on Solaris) that maps the
network topology and uses reverse resolution to determine the device name of
the router.  Because they are monitoring multiple interfaces on the router,
the name in the management software will change regularly.  To circumvent
this, we have created the reverse resolution entries to all resolve to the
same name ie:
     
     Forward Resolution entries:
      
     interfacea        129600  IN      A       10.13.255.5 
     interfaceb        129600  IN      A       10.13.128.1 
     interfacea        129600  IN      A       10.13.130.1 
     
     Reverse Resolution entries:  (13.10.in-addr.arpa) 
      
     5.255       129600  IN      PTR     interfacea.ssi.govt.nz. 
     1.128       129600  IN      PTR     interfacea.ssi.govt.nz. 
     1.130       129600  IN      PTR     interfacea.ssi.govt.nz.

They have a different management product - HP Network Node Manager running
on HP-UX 11.  For some reason, this host seems to want to verify that the A
record matches the PTR.  We get a message in syslog: 
  gethostbyaddr : timcr100.ssi.govt.nz != 10.213.130.1

As this box is managing over 2,000 addresses, it is doing a lot of name
resolution and filling up the syslog on the host very quickly.  Note that
the management works OK.  The customer called HP to get them to resolve the
problem and HP are saying that the DNS configuration of mismatched A and PTR
records is "broken".  The engineer has quoted from page 64 of O'Reilly DNS &
BIND:

     "To state as a general rule: if a host is multihomed create an address 
     record for each alias unique to one address. Create a CNAME record for 
     each alias common to all the addresses"
     
Of course, this method doesn't provide for a single name per device on the
Spectrum management server.

My questions:
1.  Is the described method considered to be a broken implementation?  I
haven't seen any explicit statements in the RFC's that state that the PTR
MUST match the A record.
2.  Any suggestions on how to work around this other than force a change
with HP?

TIA

J.

James Hall-Kenney
Sytec Resources Limited