$TTL issue?

[Borgia Joe A Contr AFRL/IFOS]

We had a mail issue over the weekend such that gradually, domains seemed to
stop resolving
properly. Domains like aol.com, prodigy.com, earthlink.net...and so on. Many
of the big name
domains anyway.

At the end of last week, we upgraded a couple of our servers to 8.2.3.
Because the folks
here are using some automated tools, utilizing Oracle to manage their
tables, I was not able
to add the $TTL line to the top of each zone file as it wants. So, BIND told
me that it was going
to use the SOA minimum instead.

That seemed fine to me, since it looks like the SOA minimum is the same as
what I would have
set the $TTL to anyway.

When I got in this morning, I tried a couple of nslookups, and sure enough,
these domains would
not resolve. Once I restarted named on each, and did my nslookups again,
these domains reappeared
again.

I was wondering if this $TTL line being missing from zone files could be the
culprit in this case.

Regards,
Joe