LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 08:57:45 +0930

BIND 9.1.0 fails badly

In recent weeks, I reported that BIND 9.1.0 failed in
the sense of apparently getting corrupted translation
tables or something:

Tue May  8 21:23:58 2001
Thu Jun 21 14:55:02 2001

While I was in NZ for the last 2 weeks, I tried to read the
incoming mail from linuxSA and noticed that there were no
items for over 24 hours. Since this was clearly impossible (!),
I knew that there must be a software problem somewhere.
It quickly became clear that my name server daemon (BIND 9.1.0)
had simply died, with no messages at all in the log files.

The motto of this story is that even if you spend a couple of weeks
fixing causes of intermittent failure in your system, you still
can't assume that you can leave your system unattended for a whole
2 weeks while you take a holiday. 
Consequently, about 16 domains went off the net for a couple of days,
which must mean that my own name daemon failed for more than
2 days, because the secondary name servers would have held out for
a day or two. 


I guess the solution to my problem is to do yet another BIND version
update and hope that the problem has been fixed.
After all, that's what happened with some serious ReiserFS bugs in
kernels 2.4.0 to about 2.4.5, and with some serious iptables bugs
in kernel 2.4.3.

My system with the unfortunate BIND 9.1.0 bug is as follows:

uname -a: Linux dog 2.4.6 #2 Thu Jul 5 03:30:18 CST 2001 i586 unknown
named -v: BIND 9.1.0
     cpu: AMD K6/3-500, stepping 12
     ram: 128 MBytes
    disk: 30 GBytes, ReiserFS except for /boot (ext2fs)
  distro: SuSE 7.1

----------------------------------------------------------------
By the way, I just heard on 729 kHz AM radio that at 1:00 p.m. today,
there will be a programme with items on "the ner from the north"
(Linux Torvalds), some advanced successor to the Internet invented by CERN
(called the "GRID" apparently) and other such things.

Well, now I have to download and install/configure the latest
BIND version.
See you later,
Alan Kennington.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
    name: Dr. Alan Kennington
  e-mail: akenning@topology.org
 website: http://www.topology.org/
    city: Adelaide, South Australia
  coords: 34.88051 S, 138.59334 E
timezone: UTC+0930 http://www.topology.org/timezone.html
 pgp-key: http://www.topology.org/key_ak2.asc

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