"refresh: retry limit for master - exceeded" What Causes This?

[Ronan Flood]

Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu> wrote:

> 	At the risk of asking a thoroughly stupid question, I
> ask, "what is happening?"  We have a refresh time of 3601 seconds
> and a retry of 900 or every 15 minutes on most zones in our DNS.
> While looking through a year's worth of logs, I began to discover
> a random sprinkling of messages like this one:
> 
> May 17 19:52:46.785 zone okstate.edu/IN: refresh: retry limit for master 
> 139.78.100.1#53 exceeded
> 
> 	Then the zone gets transfered right after that.

It hasn't been able to get the SOA for the zone from the master
over UDP.  It logs this then tries over TCP.  Could be occasional
packet loss on your network?

-- 
                      Ronan Flood <R.Flood at noc.ulcc.ac.uk>
                        working for but not speaking for
             Network Services, University of London Computer Centre
     (which means: don't bother ULCC if I've said something you don't like)