Implementing a RFC 2317 subnet zone with Digital ULTRIX 4.5

[Andreas Meile]

Dear ULTRIX and DNS users

I'm using a broadway connection with 8 fixed IP addresses as my future
Internet connection solution in the next time. To be able to maintain the
reverse DNS entries by myself, I intend to use RFC 2317. I also intend to
use an old DECstaton 5000/25 running ULTRIX 4.5 (RISC) with applied Y2K
patches as my secondary DNS server.

Today, I set up a small RFC 2317 test environment where I simulated this
situation. I used a SuSE Linux 6.4 (i386) system (BINDv4) as the ISP's DNS
replacement, i.e. this box simulated the ISP's DNS server. When I set both
the DNS zones to the Linux, it worked fine. But when I tried to move the
test DNS zone (for example "56/29.77.168.192.in-addr.arpa") to the ULTRIX
machine, I got "*** No address (A) records available for ..." errors,
although every NS record is set accordingly, i.e. the "56/29 IN NS" entry
explicitely points to the ULTRIX machine. I applied a "ls -d
56/29.77.168.192.in-addr.arpa." against both DNS servers but the output
didn't show any significant difference, except that ULTRIX shows additional
A entries for the authoritative DNS server's IP addresses.

Questions:
1.) RFC 2317 mentionnes that some older DNS server implementations don't
support the CNAME delegation trick. Is ULTRIX 4.5's "named" daemon affected
by this issue or not?

2.) The ULTRIX Y2K update kit contains an updated /usr/etc/named file (size
524'936 bytes, date November 5th, 1996. Original file: 327'680 bytes,
October 18th, 1995). When I try to use the newer one, named immediately
crashes after the first name resolution query while the original version
works fine. Anybody who knows that problem, too?

Any hints to solve these problems are appreciated. :-)

          Andreas