Please help

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "John" == John Hildreth <partsman at slutpuppy.org> writes:

    John> Is there a size or record number limit for zone files?

No. Not in the DNS protocol anyway. Some implementations of DNS or the
operating systems they run on may set or be constrained by resource
limits. For instance a file can't be bigger than N blocks or a process
can't occupy more than so many gigabytes of RAM/VM. Except for a very
small number of extreme cases like the .com zone, these limits are of
no concern. It's highly unlikely these limits affect your name
server or the zone(s) it loads.

Judging by the rest of your mail, you seem to be trying to blame
implementation or protocol limits for the failure of your zone to load
correctly. This is unlikely to be the problem. There will be a simpler
explanation which is probably indicated in your name server's
logs. Have you looked at them?

    John> What is the byte size limit of a single record?

Read sections 2.3.4 and 3.2.1 of RFC1035. Consulting Section 3.6 of
RFC1034 would be helpful too. The maximum length of a name is 255
bytes. Each name will have a class, record type and TTL associated
with it. (Another 8 bytes in total.) This is followed by a maximum of
65535 bytes of RDATA because the RDATA length field in the header is
16 bits wide.
 
    John> I have a zone file, db.cvx.algx.net with about 40,000
    John> records in it. ALOT (close to 80%) of those records are
    John> failing the forward lookups, but reverses work fine.  (all
    John> the reverse info matches the forward exactly)

You probably have syntax errors in the zone file. Check the server's
logs. Check the zone file too. Maybe there's a $ORGIN or $INCLUDE
directive which causes the domain origin to be changed so that an
entry in the zone file like
	foobar IN A 10.10.10.10
is loaded as
	foobar.some-other-domain-name. IN A 10.10.10.10
instead of
	foobar.domain-name-I-want. IN A 10.10.10.10

This is why it's usually a good idea to have fully qualified, dot
terminated domain names in zone files. They prevent these errors or
accidentally loading the incorrect data because the wrong zone file
name was given to the name server.

Another explanation for your problem could be a broken or
misconfigured resolver which is not looking up the local hostnames
properly.