incomprehensible error message starting 9.2.0/FreeBSD4.3

[Marc Kandel]

hello,

i recently took over administering some Bind 9.2 servers.  the primary =
is an x86 Solaris 8 and the slave i'm having trouble with is FreeBSD =
4.3-STABLE.  we have a cgi interface which saves the data on a "second" =
primary then uses rsync to keep the zone files synced (to the real =
primary as well as the secondary) and scp to keep the named.conf files =
synced between the 3 machines.  the script then calls "rndc -c =
$path_to_rndc.conf reload" remotely on the secondary.  i then see the =
following in my logs:

Aug  7 13:25:00 gold named[63963]: starting BIND 9.2.0 -c =
/etc/named.conf -u bind -t /bind
Aug  7 13:25:01 gold named[63963]: loading configuration: already exists
Aug  7 13:25:01 gold named[63963]: exiting (due to fatal error)

now i've seen some pretty useless error messages in my day but this =
takes the cake ... kind of like that "check engine" light ...

i've run named-checkconf and it shows no problems ... these are not the =
first changes i have made to the servers but this is the first time i've =
had issues.  The changes should have been benign ... changed an entry in =
our zone file for one IP and changed one xx.yy.zz.in-addr.arpa to add 2 =
hosts and change one existing one.  i can of course paste snippets of my =
configs if someone could give me a place to start ...

TIA,

--marc