sysquery: no addrs found for root NS

[Toomas Aas]

Hello!

I have seen this problem two times on one RELENG_4_8 machine and now I 
just saw it on a freshly installed 4.9-RELEASE. I've tried to google 
but the results i've found haven't helped me this far.

On the machines where the problem happens, I'm running BIND from the 
base sytem (8.3.4 and 8.3.6 respectively) as a caching-only nameserver 
without any local zones defined (except the 'localhost' zones created 
by make-localhost.sh).

Suddenly, out of the blue, syslogd starts writing the following into 
the log:

Nov 14 21:31:23 machine named[81]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS
(E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) 
Nov 14 21:31:23 machine named[81]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS 
(D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) 
Nov 14 21:31:23 machine named[81]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS 
(E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) 
Nov 14 21:31:23 machine named[81]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS 
(H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) 
Nov 14 21:31:23 machine named[81]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS 
(I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) 
Nov 14 21:31:23 machine named[81]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS 
(J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET)

and it logs A LOT of these messages. First time it happened on a 
RELENG_4_8 machine, the log filled up my 1 GB /var partition. The 
second time it logged ca 30 000 lines in 3 seconds and then everything 
returned to normal without any intervention. The third time, on 
4.9-RELEASE machine, when I was actually present at the time it started 
happening, I restarted the machine and this returned things to normal.

I understand what the message is saying, but I don't understan what 
causes it to say such a thing. It's hard to believe that there is 
something wrong with my root zone file, because 99.9% of the time the 
problem does not happen and DNS lookups work just fine (including 
commands like 'host e.root-servers.net').

The relevant portion of named.conf:

--------------------< cut >---------------------

forwarders {
                194.126.106.110;
                194.126.115.18;
        };


zone "." {
        type hint;
        file "named.root";
};

--------------------< cut >---------------------


The named.root file is standard one installed by FreeBSD and I haven't 
touched it:

; $FreeBSD: src/etc/namedb/named.root,v 1.9.2.1 2002/11/06 
09:24:12 dougb Exp $

--
Toomas Aas | toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/
* Error reading FAT record: Try the SKINNY one? (Y/N)