Please help

John Hildreth partsman at slutpuppy.org
Sun Feb 4 20:56:16 UTC 2001


"John" == John Hildreth <partsman at slutpuppy.org> writes:

maybe I should have said in my original email that I had already spent two
days reading logs, increasing serial numbers, verifying $ORIGIN and
INCLUDE directives, checking zone file syntax, and checking the bind
configuration. And reading just about every doc on bind I could find.
(except RFCs - I wouldnt even know where to begin looking in those to
find the answers I needed)

It was only after I did all that when I wrote to this list.

I now have the errors nailed down to os, hardware, or bind implementation.
as long as I can say "My zones and records are right." I can do nothing
else, as I am not the admin of the machine, or even dns at my company. I
was just tasked with naming all of my grtoups IPs using provisioning
software (perl scripts) given to me by one of the DNS admins.
I can now scoot this problem back to them.

I also fully agree that fqdn`s should be used in zone files,
but I have to follow the way the nameserver is setup to operate.

Thanks for your reply.

John Hildreth

>     John> Is there a size or record number limit for zone files? >
> No. Not in the DNS protocol anyway. Some implementations of DNS or the
> operating systems they run on may set or be constrained by resource
> limits. For instance a file can't be bigger than N blocks or a process
> can't occupy more than so many gigabytes of RAM/VM. Except for a very
> small number of extreme cases like the .com zone, these limits are of
> no concern. It's highly unlikely these limits affect your name
> server or the zone(s) it loads.
>
> Judging by the rest of your mail, you seem to be trying to blame
> implementation or protocol limits for the failure of your zone to load
> correctly. This is unlikely to be the problem. There will be a simpler
> explanation which is probably indicated in your name server's
> logs. Have you looked at them?
>
>     John> What is the byte size limit of a single record?
>
> Read sections 2.3.4 and 3.2.1 of RFC1035. Consulting Section 3.6 of
> RFC1034 would be helpful too. The maximum length of a name is 255
> bytes. Each name will have a class, record type and TTL associated
> with it. (Another 8 bytes in total.) This is followed by a maximum of
> 65535 bytes of RDATA because the RDATA length field in the header is
> 16 bits wide.
>     John> I have a zone file, db.cvx.algx.net with about 40,000
>     John> records in it. ALOT (close to 80%) of those records are
>     John> failing the forward lookups, but reverses work fine.  (all
>     John> the reverse info matches the forward exactly)
>
> You probably have syntax errors in the zone file. Check the server's
> logs. Check the zone file too. Maybe there's a $ORGIN or $INCLUDE
> directive which causes the domain origin to be changed so that an
> entry in the zone file like
> 	foobar IN A 10.10.10.10
> is loaded as
> 	foobar.some-other-domain-name. IN A 10.10.10.10
> instead of
> 	foobar.domain-name-I-want. IN A 10.10.10.10
>
> This is why it's usually a good idea to have fully qualified, dot
> terminated domain names in zone files. They prevent these errors or
> accidentally loading the incorrect data because the wrong zone file
> name was given to the name server.
>
> Another explanation for your problem could be a broken or
> misconfigured resolver which is not looking up the local hostnames
> properly.
>



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