bind 9.3.1 crashes during start

[Brad Knowles]

At 11:23 AM +0200 2005-05-31, Michael Niksch wrote:

>>     rbt.c:1612: INSIST(child != ((void *)0)) failed
>  I have been unable to switch from 9.2.x to 9.3.x since the beta days
>  because named kept dying on me with exactly that symptom. While the
>  daemon is initializing, I see two named processes running.

	If you're on Linux, what you're seeing is actually one process 
with two threads, but they appear as two separate processes.  IIRC, 
this is a weirdness with the Linux threading implementation.

>  I already sent the attached problem report to this list back in January.
>  Unfortunately, I didn't get a response then. Maybe someone can at least
>  explain what rbt.c is all about, so one might get an idea about what
>  might be going wrong.

	The rbt.c routine is the principal library tree that interacts 
with the red/black tree, which is how BIND-9 stores all the database 
information in memory.  I'm pretty sure that BIND stores all of the 
information in the same kind of structure, regardless of whether it 
is configured to be caching-only, authoritative-only, or some mixture 
of both.

	As to exactly what the failures mean, you'd have to ask someone 
who knows the code, and who is a much better programmer than I am.  I 
haven't done any real development in about fifteen years, although I 
can sometimes read small parts of code and get an idea of what is 
going on, maybe make a minor hack or two, etc....

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.