dig trace and "dig: Too many lookups"

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Our ns1 was down and a customer using an outsourced monitoring service 
forwarded me a report from DiG 9.3.1 doing a +trace. The ns2 (as far as I 
saw) was working fine.

I don't know the dig command that was used but I am guessing:

	dig site.example.com +trace @some.root-servers.net

since the output started with the root-servers.

It has the same lookup repeated near 90 times. It looked like this:

example.com    170877  IN      NS      ns1.example.net.
example.com    170877  IN      NS      ns2.example.net.
;; Received 124 bytes from 65.77.130.5#53(ns2.example.net) in 79 ms

example.com    170876  IN      NS      ns2.example.net.
example.com    170876  IN      NS      ns1.example.net.
;; Recedig: Too many lookups
ived 124 bytes from 65.77.130.5#53(ns2.example.net) in 80 ms


The above "Recedig: Too many lookups" was in the report forwarded to me. 
The "dig: Too many lookups" was in the middle of the "Received 124 bytes 
..." message.

It had that a few times:

;; Receivedig: too many lookups
...
;; Recedig: Too many lookups
...
;; Recedig: Too many lookups


I know this doesn't provide much details and the problem was from sixteen 
hours ago so I can't see it myself.


Anyone seen this before? Any ideas what it means?

Thanks!


  Jeremy C. Reed

p.s. Hope it is okay I replaced the domain names above.