Non-responsive name servers when started during boot on OS X Mavericks 10.9

[Larry Stone]

Background: I have been using my Macintosh as a server running the client version of OS X (not OS X Server) for many years. Until 10.9 (Mavericks), Apple provided BIND and it worked just fine. My servers were internal only providing behind-NAT local addresses for the local network as well as caching for external names. All went well.

With the release of 10.9, BIND was no longer provided (I’m currently on 10.9.1). I initially restored the version of named from 10.8 along with my configuration and zone files and all was well (at least as far as I could tell). I then switched to building from source and all was still well (I thought). The primary server was just upgraded to 9.8.6-P2 while the secondary (not a server except as a redundant name server) is still at 9.8.6-P1 (upgrade planned for this weekend).

Problem: This morning, by happenstance, both were rebooted a few minutes apart and suddenly, nobody could access anything. Finally figured out that named on both was not responding (queries timed out). Killed named (which was immediately restarted by Apple’s launchd) and all was well. Rebooted the secondary to see if it was repeatable and same thing. Nothing of interest in the log - both the initial startup at boot time and restart log identically (and it does log the RFC 1918 empty zones warning so it gets that far). I’m guessing there’s some resource not available at boot time that’s causing named to hang but that really just a will guess.

I know I’m not providing much information but there’s nothing else I can find so any help with just figuring out why it fails when started at boot time will be a help.

-- 
Larry Stone
lstone19 at stonejongleux.com
http://www.stonejongleux.com/



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