[CLUE-Tech] bind madness

[Mike Staver]

>
>
>Your problem is that you THINK you've updated them all but you may not
>have.  It happened recently that a server was swapped out and the DNS
>data was copied over, and a symlink got copied into a plain file.  Now
>instead of two filenames pointing to the same file, there were two files.
>The DNS administator edits one of the files, assuming that the sym-
>link still exists.  named.conf uses the other filename.  The edit has no
>effect because named is using the other filename, and they are no longer
>the same file because the symlink is gone.
>
>You will need to do some detective work and grepping perhaps, to find out
>where the offending serial number is coming from.
>
>dig @master.dns.server. zone.to.query. soa
>dig @slave1.dns.server. zone.to.query. soa
>dig @slave2.dns.server. zone.to.query. soa
>
>and so forth, until you've identified the source of the bad serial number.
>(It would seem logical to assume that it'd be on the master, but I don't
>know your setup, so I can't say for sure where it is.)
>
>  
>
Well, believe it or not, I was in fact updating all dns servers, and I 
even shut down the one slave I wasn't working with.  So, I just had 2 to 
worry about.  I got it fixed... and all I did was reboot the master DNS 
server, which had an uptime of 89 days or something like that.  Before 
the reboot, I ran that dig command just like you said against the 
master, and was getting the right output.  Even with that being the 
case, my slave was *still* getting the wrong serial everytime I reloaded 
it, and it claimed it was getting it from the master.  After spending 3 
hours on this nightmare, I just decided to reboot the master... and it 
fixed it.  So, the only thing I can guess is that somehow the wrong 
serial was stuck in memory somewhere, and even though I was restarting 
named (/etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart) everytime I modified the SOA for 
my domain, that somehow something was messed up with the system. 

-- 

                                -Mike Staver
                                 staver at fimble.com
                                 mstaver at globaltaxnetwork.com