Root name servers not working in BIND 8.2?

[Kevin Darcy]

I suspect that your internal root servers may be occasionally returning
SERVFAIL. A quick comparison of the BIND 8.1.2 and BIND 8.2.2 source code
reveals that 8.1.2 seems to treat this occurrence as more of a temporary
error, and just retries, while 8.2.2 sets the "lame" flag on the
NS record cache entry and avoids the NS for a while, thus giving the
"lameness" more weight. You can disable lame server caching with
"lame-ttl 0" in your options, but I think you need to get to the cause of
the problem on the root servers.

I would troubleshoot the problem myself, except that it appears there is
some sort of routing problem or firewall rule blocking DNS access to
those servers even though we're on the same intranet...


- Kevin

Andre Schneickert wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I recently upgraded a BIND 8.1.x server to BIND 8.2.2.
> Since then, the server is not able to query hosts via the internal
> root name servers, queries for local zones are working.
>
> The root name server hint zone is configured correctly, but seems not
> to be loaded by the server on startup.
>
> I took a look at the named.dump and found this:
>
> ; --- Hints ---
> $ORIGIN .
> .       3600000 IN      NS      demans01.adtranz.com.   ;Cl=0 LAME=515
>         3600000 IN      NS      demans02.adtranz.com.   ;Cl=0 LAME=515
> $ORIGIN adtranz.com.
> demans02        3600000 IN      A       53.191.114.42   ;NT=768 Cl=0
> demans01        3600000 IN      A       53.191.114.41   ;NT=517 Cl=0
>
> Why does it declare my root name servers as lame?
>
> Using forwarder entries to my root name servers instead works, but I
> would like to use the hint zone instead of forwarders.
>
> I switched back to BIND 8.1.x and the root zone worked again.
>
> Any ideas?