nsupdate:"cannot read rdata"

[Kevin Darcy]

Charles Duffy wrote:

>I'm using SuSE's bind-9.2.3-76.9 package from SLES9. I'm not certain as to
>the correctness of my server's configuration -- but just knowing more
>about this error (what is rdata? where is it read from? what
>misconfigurations could make it unreadable?) would do a great deal of
>good. Google has been quite unhelpful, hence my appeal to this list.
>
Well, RDATA is kind of a fundamental part of DNS. It's the "payload" of 
any given Resource Record. For instance, the RDATA of an A (address) 
record is the address itself, the RDATA of an MX (Mail eXchanger) record 
is a combination of the name of a mail server and the relative 
preference which it should be given among all of the mail servers for 
the domain name. Different record types have different RDATA structures, 
so it's not that easy to generalize.

Looks like you flubbed the syntax for your nsupdate prereq or update 
commands, e.g. an improperly formatted address for an A-record update, a 
missing preference value for an MX-record update, the wrong number of 
fields for an SOA record, or non-numeric where only numeric was 
expected. Something like that.

                                                                         
                                 - Kevin