CNAME Records from Hell Just Wouldn't Go away.

[Martin McCormick]

	One of our clients had a web site off campus that went bad,
orphaning two CNAME records of ours.

"piece of cake," I said to myself as I used nsupdate to re-write the
aliases and point them somewhere else.

	Not so fast.  I got a servfail on each one, apparently because
nsupdate tried to follow the redirection and came to the dead end that
hundreds of customers were also finding.

	I began using successively larger and larger hammers to fix
it.  Finally, I had to kill the master dns, physically delete the
CNAMES from the zone file and restart it.

	That did work and I was able to use nsupdate to add the
desired CNAMEs.

	Now for our slave.  It was taking the new updates from the
master, but the old CNAME records kept coming back until I finally took
the big hammer to it and killed it, wiped out the whole zone file and
restarted it.  That worked fine, but wasn't there a better way to do
this?

	The manner of the failure was simply that the remote A records
for the sites in question went poof! and appear to have been deleted
from the remote dns.  I really hated doing these big things in the
middle of a busy day so I would like to know a more elegant way since
nsupdate got confused.  Thanks for any good suggestions.



Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group