Named goes deaf

[Scott Haneda]

Hello, running BIND 9.4.2-P2 on OS X 10.5, this is just what comes  
with OS X out of the box.  Today, my secondary NS provider could not  
zone transfer.  I looked into it and could not telnet to port 53,  
connection refused.

This happens quite often on my friends machine, but he runs OS X 10.3  
and is using QuickDNS to manage his zones.  I figured it was just an  
old OS issue.  I just restart named on his machine, and all is better.

In both cases, named was answering queries, I assume since those  
happen on a UDP port?  How can one go deaf and not the other?  Any  
idea why named goes deaf on me every now and then?

All I have to do is issue `rndc stop` and then launchd picks it up and  
starts it again.  All is then well.

What is the correct way to restart named on OS X?  I can run `rndc  
stop` but `rndc start` is a non known command.  The plist that is part  
of launchd is just calling `/usr/sbin/named -f`

I could easily write a small script that tried to talk to port 53 tcp,  
and then restart, but this seems to have plagued me in some way or  
another since OS X 10.3 and I would like to get to the bottom of it.   
Can someone explain to me if there are an other repercussions other  
than my secondary will not be able to pull zones in this case?

Thanks
--
Scott