SUMMARY: in.named: Masters for secondary zone unreachable

Scott McDermott (scottm@rain.kcls.org)
Thu, 17 Apr 1997 14:05:39 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 17 Apr 1997, Scott McDermott wrote:

> DNS problem. 2 DNS servers. ns1, a sol 2.5.1 is primary, ns2, a sol 2.4
> is secondary. Secondary server cannot resolve our domain (how convenient,
> it was lunch time), and gets this message:
>
> Apr 17 12:58:44 rain named[26767]: zoneref: Masters for secondary zone
> "kcls.org" unreachable
>
> IP connectivity seems 100% ok. I've killed, HUP'd, and killed again to no
> avail. I've upped the serial number on ns1, I've removed the backup file
> from ns2. If I do an nslookup I get:
>
> > www.kcls.org
> Server: rain.kcls.org (this is ns2)
> Address: 198.104.1.64
>
> *** rain.kcls.org can't find www.kcls.org: Server failed
>
> Works fine on ns1. Until the problem is fixed, I've got the secondary DNS
> shutdown...

For my next trick...

<sigh> I started manually transferring the zone with named-xfer and saw
the problem. I had:

kcls.org IN CNAME rain.kcls.org.

in the kcls zone file. BIND disapproves of moves like this. Older
versions complain, but still work - apparently 4.9.3-P1 just chokes on it.

The moral is, if you know it's wrong, don't do it!

/*
Scott McDermott - Systems Administrator | Deliver yesterday,
King County Library System | Code today,
PGP key available in the usual places | Think tomorrow
*/