Compile to avoid core generation

[Kevin Darcy]

Francisco Jorge wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am running bind on a machine that is heavily loaded. From time to
> time, the named process crashes, generating a huge core.
>
> I can assume the crashes, but the core dump leaves the machine
> completely out of service.
>
> I would like to know if there is a way to compile the named daemon in
> a way that in case of a crash it does not generate a core.

It's your operating system that's generating the core file; you can't
turn it off with a compile option.

One kludgey way of preventing core files is to run named as an
unprivileged user, in a directory that is not writable by that user.
This would, however, prevent you from writing other sorts of files in
that directory, e.g. log files, debug files, stats files, secondary zone
files, so you'd have to do a lot of customization.

Why not try to fix the root cause? BIND 9 deals with memory exhaustion
more gracefully than BIND 8; are you running BIND 9? Is there something
other than memory exhaustion which is causing named to crash? Submit a
bug report.


- Kevin