OK, I have a head scratcher

[Jim Cline]

Or I am just brain dead.
I am charged with maintaining a DNS for the community college where I work.
My DNS covers several subdomains, the main domain is administered at our
district office.  The are also three other campuses that run their on DNS on
their assigned sub-domains.  We are planning to upgrade our DNS soon (within
the next two weeks) but I have no desire to transfer the strange problems we
have been dealing with since the new year...

1) Sometimes we can reach servers at our district and sometimes we can't
2) I can force zone transfers with the district master DNS with named-xfer
but when I run named.restart I get the following errors (Note edit
3) the transfers among the other three campuses and us runs without a hitch.

   Jan 19 16:28:25 lazarus named[26235]: starting.  named 4.9.3-REL Tue Apr
2 09:46:40 PST 1996
   Jan 19 16:28:25 lazarus  root at lazarus:/export/home/maint/named
   Jan 19 16:28:26 lazarus named[26235]: db.sec.cccd: line 6: SOA for
"cccd.edu" not at zone top "dis.cccd.edu"
   Jan 19 16:28:27 lazarus named[26235]: Zone "dis.cccd.edu" (file
db.sec.cccd): no NS RRs found at zone top
   Jan 19 16:28:28 lazarus named[26236]: zoneref: Masters for secondary zone
"dis.cccd.edu" unreachable

Like I said we are planning to upgrade the DNS to BIND version 8.12, running
on a newer Pentium running Linux Slackware 7.  the old machine is a old 486
running Solaris x86 and bind v4.

Please help and please echo replies to my E-Mail so I don't overlook them.

--
Jim Cline
Info. Sys. Tech / Instructor
Coastline Community College
714-241-6246x17556
jcline at cccd.edu