"refresh: retry limit for master - exceeded" What Causes This?

Martin McCormick martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu
Thu Jun 8 13:57:48 UTC 2006


	At the risk of asking a thoroughly stupid question, I
ask, "what is happening?"  We have a refresh time of 3601 seconds
and a retry of 900 or every 15 minutes on most zones in our DNS.
While looking through a year's worth of logs, I began to discover
a random sprinkling of messages like this one:

May 17 19:52:46.785 zone okstate.edu/IN: refresh: retry limit for master 
139.78.100.1#53 exceeded

	Then the zone gets transfered right after that.  This
particular message is from May 17 of 2005, but we get them a few
times a day right up to the present and there doesn't seem to be
any particular calamity happening to the network or our DNS's.
The zone I used as an example is a very busy zone which gets
updated via dhcp all the time so any one zone version doesn't sit
around very long before the notifies go out and it is time to get
a new zone.

	One of our slaves generated 31383224 or over 313 million
lines of log and a bit over 6,000 or about .02% were retry
errors about various zones.  I am just curious as to their
significance since at least the zone I used as an example
probably changes many times an hour and, during busy times, many
times a minute.

	I have noticed this behavior on all our bind DNS's
regarding slave zones and I am wondering if it is an incorrect
setting on my part or exactly what.  Many thanks.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group



More information about the bind-users mailing list