100% CPU / wedge with 9.8.3-P4 & RPZ?

[Vernon Schryver]

> From: Phil Mayers <p.mayers at imperial.ac.uk>

> If it's not RPZ, those xfr timings are very coincidental. But of course, 
> I'm just guessing. It could be phase of the moon for all I know at this 
> stage.

That only two large Spamahus transfers of the dozen transfers so
far this month were coincident with the problem suggests the phase
of something matters.

In BIND 9.8.3, response policy zones were merely zones with an
auxilary radix tree for IP addesses.  All locking for updates was
the same as with any other zone.

I get no joy from port 80 at spamhaus.org now, so perhaps Spamhaus is
under DoS attack yet again.  Another random guess is that the problem
you saw is related to IXFRs afflicted by DoS attacks on the master.
On the other hand, the masters for rpz.spamhaus.org differ.  On the
third hand, maybe transfers to the RPZ masters were affected and that
caused hiccups or other oddities in the transfers to your systems.

To debug and so have the least hope of eventually fixing this or
any similar problem, I would build BIND with -g and capture a core
file and associated libraries for a hung example,.  Whether your
guess blaming RPZ is right or wrong, no progess is likely to be
made without a core file.


Vernon Schryver    vjs at rhyolite.com