Winnt 8.x Named-Xfer Buffer Limit - Zone Transfer Problem

[Danny Mayer]

At 02:38 PM 7/15/02, Sam Norris wrote:
>Hello - I am having a major issue with BIND 8.x running on Windows NT 2k.  I
>have the same problem with any versions of BIND 8.  This problem does not
>exist other platforms I believe, just WinNT.  If someone could help me out
>with this I would greatly appreciate it.  I am sure that some other people
>have been running into this problem using the WinNT port but possibly
>haven't narrowed the problem down enough.  I saw a lot of other posts about
>having syntax errors and this must be the cause of the Premature EOF, but I
>have made 110% sure that there are no syntax errors...
>
>Problem:  I am unable to transfer zones FROM a winnt bind service that
>results in a file greater than 52k.  The transfer gets about 50-60k worth of
>data then stops.
>
>Symptoms:  Cannot transfer any zone file that is larger than 52k in size.  I
>have over 5000 zones, all zones under 52k transfer with no problems, not one
>above 52k will come across.
>
>Currently I am transferring from WinNT 2kDNS to BIND with no problems.  BIND
>will act as a secondary no problem and transfer the zones 100% from the
>primary Win2k DNS server.  Now if I try to transfer from BIND to BIND using
>the WinNT version 8.x I am having failures on all larger zones.
>
>Domain Name:  WHA.LA
>Zone File Size on primary:  437k
>Named.Conf config is shown below.
>
>These are the errors that I can see:
>
>Using NSLOOKUP and performing an LS -D WHA.LA gives me this:
>     ... lots of data transferred up here... everything up to this point is
>good.
>      add                            MX     10   mail.wha.me
>      add                            MX     20   mail.add.wha.la
>      add                            A      68.7.225.122
>      edit.add                       A      68.7.225.122
>      wha.add                        A      68.7.225.122
>      *** invalid name, terminating transfer.
>     *** Can't list domain wha.la: Unspecified error
>     >
>---> there are no syntax errors, the eventlog/syslog doesn't report
>anything.  Also if I edit the file and remove 1-2 records it fails in a
>different spot.  I cannot determine how BIND decides which order to put the
>records in... so I tried removing one record at a time until I was able to
>successfully transfer the zone.  I weeded the zone file down to 52k and then
>it transferred.  (That took a while!)
>
>Event Viewer:
>     Premature EOF, fetching "wha.la"
>----> this is generated from named-xfer process.
>
>Named.Run debug log:
>     req: nlookup(wha.la) id 5 type=252 class=1
>     req: found 'wha.la' as 'wha.la' (cname=0)
>     approved AXFR from [192.168.1.11].1090 for "wha.la"
>     finddata(): buflen=65511
>     zone transfer (AXFR) of "wha.la" (IN) to [192.168.1.11].1090 serial
>175766
>---> The file just stops and doesn't report any errors after this.  Notice
>the buflen=65511, this is about how much data it gets before it dies.
>
>This is the executable that BIND is calling to start the transfer:
>     startxfer() wha.la
>     d:\bind.i2\bin\named-xfer.exe -z wha.la -f wha.la.db -C 1 -P 13568 -d
>1 -l xfer.ddt 66.185.162.20 axfr
>     started xfer child 3028
>     next maintenance for zone 'wha.la' in 7200 sec
>---> no apparent problems here.

There is a bug somewhere in the code that causes it to send just one 64K
TCP packet and it is failing to send additional packets.  It you are not
running BIND 8.3.3 you should upgrade and tried that version.  If that is
failing you should upgrade to BIND 9.2.1 which will not have these problems.

Danny