LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 21:23:54 +0930

odd behaviour of BIND 9.1

Possible BIND 9.1. cache error problem.

I'd be interested to know if anyone understands why
the following apparent problem with BIND 9.1 happens.

For a while, I was finding that anyone who tried to send me
e-mail from an address like zzz@bigpond.com generated these sorts
of messages in the /var/log/mail file (on a SuSE 7.1 system).

=================================================================
May  8 18:58:24 dog sendmail[8344]: f489S3s08344: ruleset=check_mail, arg1=<zzz@bigpond.com>, relay=[139.134.6.21], reject=451 4.1.8 <zzz@bigpond.com>... Domain of sender address zzz@bigpond.com does not resolve

May  8 18:58:24 dog sendmail[8344]: f489S3s08344: from=<zzz@bigpond.com>, size=2013, class=0, nrcpts=0, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=[139.134.6.21] 
=================================================================

This is a little surprising, because bigpond.com is not the kind of domain
you'd expect to disappear off the DNS. 
So I tried nslookup, and got this sort of thing.

=================================================================
dog /etc/rc.d# nslookup bigpond.com
Note:  nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead.  Run nslookup with
the `-sil[ent]' option to prevent this message from appearing.
Server:         203.38.148.51
Address:        203.38.148.51#53

** server can't find bigpond.com.: SERVFAIL  
=================================================================

Well, that could be just a failure of my very own DNS server.
Or it could be caused by "nscd" - but that's not even running.
So I tried some other servers:

=================================================================
dingo /usr/src> nslookup - ns1.telstra.net
Default Server:  ns1.telstra.net
Address:  203.50.0.24

> bigpond.com
Server:  ns1.telstra.net
Address:  203.50.0.24

*** ns1.telstra.net can't find bigpond.com: Non-existent host/domain
> topology.org
Server:  ns1.telstra.net
Address:  203.50.0.24

Name:    topology.org
Address:  203.48.2.140
=================================================================

Well, even the telstra DNS server doesn't find bigpond.com.
But several other nameservers on the net _do_ resolve bigpond.com.
So I checked that they haven't forgotten to renew their domain
name registration. No problem there. They're a few years ahead.

So I tried giving the HUP to my "named" processes.
No change.

Finally, I killed my "named" and started it up fresh.
And now everthing is fine.

Conclusion:
BIND 9.1 probably has a problem!!!

And my guess is that Telstra's name server has the same problem.
But I'm not going to tell them because they haven't got back to me
to fix up problems with their secondary name service for my domain names.

Does anyone know any more about this?
I really don't want to go scouring all over the net looking
for snippets and clues about this.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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