Caching only servers

[Georgeson, Evan [NCSUS Non J&J]]

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Thanks Kevin...I've since uncovered these wonderful little tidbits.
See, we use QIP and in so doing we have some systems with ISC BIND
with the majority using Lucent-BIND. Now, 2 weeks ago our deployment
dept removed 9.1.3 and went to Lucent-BIND. These serving problems
just started last week so I suspect this...considering our caching
servers only have, don't laugh, 256 MB of RAM (my laptop has 512!) I
believe the Lucent BIND added some memory overhead that pushed an
already overtaxed system(s) over the edge. Today we've since reverted
to 9.1.3. We will be adding more memory, of course, but do you think
that there is any reason to re-visit my cleaning-interval? Do you
have a suggestion on a new value? Also, is there a Lucent-BIND
support group similar to this? Thank you again for your time and
advice.

Evan

- -----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Darcy [mailto:kcd at daimlerchrysler.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2002 5:19 PM
To: BIND Users (bind-users at isc.org)
Subject: Re: Caching only servers



"Georgeson, Evan [NCSUS Non J&J]" wrote:

>
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> Hi,
>
>         I'm suffering some bizarre symptoms on my two cache
> servers.  For some reason, they stop servicing internal requests
> and then 
> restart after a few minutes. Could there be a load issue?

Yes :-)

> I'm going to give
> you a list of the named.conf options can I get someone to check
> them  for validity and confirm correct or no?? Thank you very much
> if you  can help or advise.

Your cleaning-interval is set to 4 minutes. That seems a little
rabid. Did you increase the frequency to try to keep your memory
usage down? If you have sufficient memory, I'd relax the cleaning
interval. By touching your memory pages this frequently, you may be
forcing them to be resident more often and actually *hurting* your
memory situation.

> Also, is it logged when nslookup queries return nxdomain or
> servfail,  e.g., queries.log??

No, I do not believe this is available in the query log.

NXDOMAIN is a fairly routine reponse code; clients ask for
non-existent names all of the time (especially when they are
configured with searchlists, grrrrr....)

SERVFAIL is not so common, but in general, whatever is causing the
SERVFAIL condition is being logged by your nameserver in some other
way. Unfortunately, there are many different things which can give
rise to a SERVFAIL -- it's kind of a catch-all category.

You can try turning up the logging for various categories and/or
turning on debugging, if you want more information on these
conditions, but be aware that this will drive up your resource
consumption, which you may not want to do at this time.


- - Kevin



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