is BIND removing zones?

[Marten Lehmann]

Hello,

As we are managing several thousand zones, we are structuring our zone 
files by directions, e.g.

abc.com -> a/ab/abc.com.db
bbc.com -> b/bb/bbc.com.db

I noticed a strange behaviour: Sometimes, all .db-files of a certain 
direction like b/bb/ are lost and BIND reports in the logfile:

2005-02-16 14:30:08 error: zone bbc.com/IN:
loading master file /etc/named.d/zones/b/bb/bbc.com.db: file not found

But I can proof that the zone file onces exists, because before it was 
loaded successfully. This happened more than once and for some reason it 
always happens to the whole direction. How can this happen? The system 
is definetely not compromised and there's no script in the set of 
scripts for automated zone generation, that deals with rmdir() or 
unlink(). So I suspect BIND to be responsible. In what conditions does 
BIND delete directions inluding its content?

As said before, this happened several times. In the end, it's everytime 
another directory that becomes deleted. As the systems are not very old, 
I doubt that it's a filesystem problem.

Regards
Marten