ndc stats problem on busy DNS servers

[Kevin Darcy]

"Truss" is your friend.


- Kevin

Alexis Oosterhoff wrote:

> I am developing an in-house system for monitoring DNS caching server within
> our organisation. We're running  8.2.3-REL on a Solaris 2.6 system.
>
> I have 9 servers which are dumping their stats to named.stats on an hourly
> basis, using a call to "ndc stats". Most of the machines are dumping the
> stats reliably, however, on two of our busier caching servers (approx. 400
> lookups/sec), "ndc stats" works some times and not others.
>
> Bind is running as follows:
>
>     named -u nobody -g nobody -v /etc/named.conf
>
> and ndc access is configured with the following controls statement:
>
>     controls { unix "/var/named/ndc.d/ndc" perm 0774 owner 0 group
> 600001; };
>
> The error message being displayed when the "ndc stats" call fails is:
>
>     cannot open stat file, "named.stats"
>
> The "named.stats" file is created, owned by user "nobody" but with null file
> size.
>
> If this were happening on every call to "ndc stats", I'd say it was a
> configuration problem. However, as it's happening irregularly (no
> discernable pattern, maybe works 30% of the time), I'm wondering if there
> are issues related to system sizing (though the machine is running with dual
> 300MHz CPUs and 2GB RAM), or in running in a chown-ed environment.
>
> Any thoughts would be appreciated.
>
> Alexis Oosterhoff