DNS - Primary down the slave doesnt do anything

[Pete Ehlke]

* hayden.wimmer at lwbref.com <hayden.wimmer at lwbref.com> said, on [020116 10:21]:
> 
> when my primary DNS server went down the salve stopped working too.  it
> could no longer do lookups and all of the clients were toast too...they
> could not get anywhere.  as soon as i had the master server back up all was
> well....
> also, i am running bind 8.2.1 on redhat 6.2...
> 
> any advice?
> 
Three pieces of advice:

First, before you do anything else, upgrade your bind installation to
a version that doesn't have remote root holes that are being actively
exploited in the wild. Then do a thorough inspection of your machines to
determine if they've already been broken into, which is quite likely if
they're internet connected.

Second, when you're done with that, give us some information we can work
with. The machines' names, if they're publicly accessable, and your
configuration files at a minimum. 

Third, the wording of your message suggests that you are running your
name servers as both authoritative servers and resolver hosts. Best
practice is to decouple these functions; you should seriously consider
doing so.

-Pete