Zone transfer failing

[Chris Buxton]

On Jun 24, 2009, at 1:54 AM, Scott Haneda wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2009, at 11:57 PM, Chris Buxton wrote:
>> On Jun 23, 2009, at 3:16 PM, Scott Haneda wrote:
>>> Good observation.  This is a long standing issue that I assumed  
>>> was solved.  Named on OS X will go deaf on port 53 tcp for some  
>>> reason.  I just kicked it, and now I can tcp dig it.
>>>
>>> $dig +tcp sugardimplesdesigns.com SOA @ns1.hostwizard.com +short
>>> ns1.hostwizard.com. scott.hostwizard.com. 2009062206 28800 7200  
>>> 2419200 3600
>>>
>>> I now the men and mice guys are familiar with this, if you guys  
>>> are reading, have you ever pinned this down, or found a solution  
>>> to it?
>>
>> No, we have not. However, it appears to be related to the port  
>> being idle for some time. Servers that use their TCP port more  
>> frequently, usually due to having lots of zone updates that need to  
>> be replicated to slaves, don't appear to be affected. You might try  
>> creating a cron job that digs against the TCP port every 5 minutes  
>> to try to keep the port "active" and prevent it from gong deaf.
>>
>> I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that we've seen this on  
>> other operating systems as well, although the lion's share of  
>> reports have been with Mac OS X.
>
>
> In your estimation, a named/BIND bug, or OS level bug?  How would  
> one go about finding out, and working it out, so we can solve this?  
> I can certainly and very easily shove a launchd job in to run every  
> 5 minutes, and do not even consider it much of a kludge, but would  
> like to solve it for others, as it is a bear to track down.

I'm not really qualified to determine where the bug is, but I would  
guess there's a bug in the IP stack that most other server software  
doesn't trigger. Perhaps ISC could find a way to work around it, or  
perhaps Apple could fix it.

My WAG is that Apple inherited this bug from *BSD, from which large  
portions of the Darwin kernel are (or at least were) derived.

Chris Buxton
Professional Services
Men & Mice