[CLUE-Tech] DNS woes

[Dave Anselmi]

cnb at eircom.net wrote:

> I'm trying to set up a previously slave server as a primary as the primary
> has been down for a few weeks and the primary DNS servers out there seem to
> have updated our domain as being non-existent (be gentle, not that familiar
> with DNS).

You might try spelling out your problem, rather than listing a bunch of config
stuff and letting us guess.  Have you tried nslookup to this machine?  It looks
like bind runs, so it should give you lookups on other domains.  Which of your
domains don't get the right answer?

I would also recommend O'Reilly's DNS book.  It is excellent and a must have
for anyone who runs a production DNS.

Let's see what might be the problem:

[...] snipped irrelevant messages


> Feb 13 01:19:56 leviathan named[16936]: dns_zone_load: zone
> 22.125.194.in-addr.arpa/IN: could not find NS and/or SOA records
> Feb 13 01:19:56 leviathan named[16936]: dns_zone_load: zone
> 22.125.194.in-addr.arpa/IN: has 0 SOA records
> Feb 13 01:19:56 leviathan named[16936]: dns_zone_load: zone
> 22.125.194.in-addr.arpa/IN: no NS records

Ok, you don't have any SOA or NS records for reverse lookups on 194.125.22.0.
You also only have one PTR record, for localhost, which does outside users no
good.  Your named.boot says these records are in the db.127.0.0 file, but
perhaps it should be db.194.125.22.  If you have that file, change named.boot.
If not, change the db.127.0.0 file.

Simplest way to change a secondary to a primary seems to be to just copy the
config and zone files from one to the other.  But I haven't done that, so maybe
it's harder than it seems.

Dave