FORMERR Messages in BIND 9.3.2

Barry Finkel b19141 at achilles.ctd.anl.gov
Wed Jul 5 18:23:22 UTC 2006


I recently upgraded BIND from 9.2.4 to 9.3.2.  I am now seeing in the
syslog of two of my DNS servers messages like this:

     Jun 29 13:26:35 titania.ctd.anl.gov named[18180]:
       [ID 866145 daemon.info] FORMERR resolving
       'nicholas.8dstar.com/AAAA/IN': 64.250.235.139#53

I did not see anything in the 9.3.2 CHANGES file about this message.
Is this something new that 9.3.2 catches but that 9.2.4 did not?
Or is it something that was caught in 9.2.4 but not logged.

I am seeing a large number of these (342,644 since Friday at 03:10),
and I am trying to see how to eliminate logging of the message and to
discover what is causing the message.

I ran a snoop trace on one of my servers, and I traced one FORMERR.
I see in response to the query:

     What are the NS records for liarignorance.info.?

that the response packet contains

     1 question
     0 answers
     4 authority (NS) records
     5 additional records (the addresses of the four nameservers plus
                           some garbage).

I assume that it is this garbage in the fifth additional record that
is causing the FORMERR message from BIND.  I checked the version of
the server that created this response packet - 

     "UltraDNS Version 2.9.6.1 Build 5094"

Is it correct to have the answer appear in the authority section instead
of the answer secion?  Would this cause a FORMERR?  I did a standard 

     dig anl.gov ns

using one of my BIND slaves, and I get four answer sections and no
authority sections:

     flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 4

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994



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