Bind 9 unexpected behaviour

[Dominic Ijichi]

Hi,

I'm testing Bind9.0.0 for use in a large production environment
(150,000+ domains) and have come across a few oddities.

1)    named doing a fatal exit when coming across any sort of problem in
named.conf I can sort of live with (although it would nice to have a
toggle to turn that behaviour off) but when there's any sort of zone
syntax error it also dies on the initial load (not documented that I can
find).  This is really annoying when I've got many many domains being
edited by users - sometimes mistakes are made.

2)    I often get this sort of error when doing an initial load:

Sep 29 17:01:01 mercury named[23149]: com/zonefile: open: unexpected
error
Sep 29 17:01:01 mercury named[23149]: dns_zone_load: zone
zonefile.com/IN: dns_journal_rollforward returned: unexpected error
Sep 29 17:01:01 mercury named[23149]: loading zones: unexpected error
Sep 29 17:01:01 mercury named[23149]: exiting (due to fatal error)

If I hit the up arrow and start it again, it will be OK (sometimes I'll
get the error a second time and have to restart a third time).

I'm starting with /path/to/named -n 2

3)    I'm trying out the rndc.  It claims the reload command is
implemented, but when I try and 'rndc reload domain.tld' it gives two
separate success lines for reload and domain.tld.  Will bind9 rndc allow
reloads of a single domainname?  It's very useful for me to reload a
single domain rather than 150,000!!!

'part from that, bind9 looks like a really big improvement - it's
certainly a lot faster and it's nice not having to wait for named to
load named.conf, load all the zone files **and** then send out all of
it's notifies before it bothers responding to queries...

My system is: RedHat Linux 6.1, 2xCPU, 1/2Gb, Bind9.0.0release

Cheers
dom at ijichi.org

ps - is there the same limitation as bind8 where the entire named
process must reside in physical ram and not swap out?  if so, how do I
stop it swapping out?  Bind8 used to use 750+Mb, Bind9 uses about 350+Mb
so is better but still hammers my machine!!