any BIND experts?

[_dobbo_]

I have the dubious honour of managing two installs of Bind on our network. Currently running the latest iteration of BIND 8, and finding that one of the servers fails fairly regularly, no errors, no warnings, just dies.

Pondering the move to BIND 9 as I know it's a big enhancement. anyone done this care to comment on how compatable existing named.conf files and zone files are?

From what I can see the named.conf is portable, but I fear my many hundreds of zone files may need to be re-written...

[zumbruk]

_dobbo_ said:

I have the dubious honour of managing two installs of Bind on our network. Currently running the latest iteration of BIND 8, and finding that one of the servers fails fairly regularly, no errors, no warnings, just dies.

That seems to be the standard failure mode for BIND. Whose is it, and is it patched up to date? When this happened to me, patching BIND sorted it out. Also, have you recently added anything to the DNS database? Again, adding entries seems to overflow something in early versions & they pass away silently in the night.

_dobbo_ said:

Pondering the move to BIND 9 as I know it's a big enhancement. anyone done this care to comment on how compatable existing named.conf files and zone files are? From what I can see the named.conf is portable, but I fear my many hundreds of zone files may need to be re-written...

I've never done a migration, but looking at the documentation (www.secnetix.de/documents/bind9/misc/migration.txt) it doesn't look that onerous. However, doing it in the middle of a DNS problem seems unwise!

[JamieBeeston]

The zones should port to 9 without issue, but I wouldnt..

I dont like 9, too flakey and buggy.

I've had 8 on my personal box for years, and it just doesnt crash.

Try upgrading the version you're running to something newer / known good.

J

[_dobbo_]

Interesting - it would appear that BIND 9 is not the panacea ISC would have me believe!

I got the binaries from ISC themselves, hereso I'm not sure if there is a better source out there. I can get one of our developers to compile from the source code but imagine it will be little different to what I have...

Am running the latest and greatest all patched up.

What's odd is that the primary doesn't fail, but the secondary does both running same version, both same zone files. There's some comments about an unpatched forwarding issue in BIND 8 but we don't use forwarding or stub zones.

Back to the drawing board.

[JamieBeeston]

I would never run binaries.. compile ALL the time! that way you KNOW its compatible 100% with your system and crucially the versions you are using.

Last time I had a core dump on bind was in 2003 iirc, when some 8.2.3 exploit was out.

J

[_dobbo_]

I think we may be down to a windows vs unix argument. Both our servers are windows, which probably explains the failures! move to unix... seems overkill to run a unix server just for BIND.

[JamieBeeston]

_dobbo_ said:

I think we may be down to a windows vs unix argument. Both our servers are windows, which probably explains the failures! move to unix... seems overkill to run a unix server just for BIND.

aaah significant fact missing from the opening post.



J