stops answering at same time every day

Allie M Hopkins allie at lsu.edu
Fri Feb 25 14:57:10 UTC 2005





I turned on query logging last night and nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Only one server stopped responding this time, but it was our master so all
zone transfers are stopped for the same amount of time.  The CPU
utilization was low, no crazy connections, no different processes running.
I'm truly stumped.

Doesn't anyone have any advice or suggestions?

I can log into the machine remotely during this downtime and do anything
else as usual.  The only thing different is the name server stops
responding to all types of requests.  What could possibly cause this at
such a regular interval?

Many departments take internet based tests in the afternoon, so this is
really affecting many people.  I'm just out of ideas.  Tonight I will have
a sniff going on the servers to see if there is something else I'm missing.

I'm begging for suggestions.  I've been troubleshooting for weeks.

Allie


|---------+---------------------------->
|         |           Allie M Hopkins  |
|         |           <allie at lsu.edu>  |
|         |           Sent by:         |
|         |           bind-users-bounce|
|         |           @isc.org         |
|         |                            |
|         |                            |
|         |           02/24/2005 08:39 |
|         |           AM               |
|---------+---------------------------->
  >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                                                                                                  |
  |       To:       bind9-users at isc.org                                                                                                              |
  |       cc:       (bcc: Allie M Hopkins/allie/LSU)                                                                                                 |
  |       Subject:  stops answering at same time every day                                                                                           |
  >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|








All three of our nameservers - two running 9.3.0 and one running 9.2.3 -
stop answering at the same time every afternoon.  Not all three everyday -
sometimes just one, sometimes two, sometimes all three, but always at
6:30pm for 10-15 minutes.  My first thought was that a script or other os
application was stopping the service from answering but I've been running
logs and nothing points to anything peculiar.  No crontabs, no extra
processes running.


I'm going to turn on query logging during this interval to see what the
clients are doing, perhaps something is hosing the servers making it unable
to respond.  I know about the cleaning interval, but I thought the default
was 60 minutes.  I don't have this option set anywhere to change the
default.  I just can't seem to figure it out.  No weird connections at this
time either, according to netstat.

Anyone have any ideas???  I'm running AIX 4.3.3.  What other logs can I
turn on to get a better handle on the situation?

MRTG is graphing the traffic load.  You can see the dips on the servers:
http://kahuna.net.lsu.edu/mrtg/dns.html

Allie M Hopkins






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