named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS ..........

[Toomas Aas]

Hi!

> >From time to time I get this:
> 
> Sep  7 12:57:44 it named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS (d.root-servers.net)
> Sep  7 12:57:44 it named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS (a.root-servers.net)
> Sep  7 12:57:44 it named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS (c.root-servers.net)
> Sep  7 12:57:45 it named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS (h.root-servers.net)
> Sep  7 12:57:45 it named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS (f.root-servers.net)
> Sep  7 12:57:45 it named[353]: sysquery: no addrs found for root NS (b.root-servers.net)
> 

This problem plagued me for a long time on several FreeBSD 4 servers 
running BIND 8 from the base system. Google finds numerous discussions 
on this problem in various lists/newsgroups but a solution is rarely 
offered.

Finally, I found someone's theory in a NetBSD (or was it OpenBSD) 
forum. I can't tell whether it is true or not, but it makes sense 
to me.

If your BIND is configured to use a forwarder and this forwarder is 
really good then BIND (almost) never needs to contact the root servers. 
The root zone times out in memory and it is not reloaded from disk. It 
is only loaded when BIND is started. Thus, if your BIND finally needs 
to contact a root name server after a long time of getting all 
responses from forwarder, it turns out that the data for root zone is 
not available...

Now, as I said, I cannot tell whether this theory is true or not. What 
I can say is that on all 4 machines where I run BIND I configured 
one of two workarounds:
- use "forward only" so you *never* need to check the root zone
- do not use forwarders at all so you check the root zone fairly 
  frequently.

I did this almost a year ago, and after that I never have had this 
problem again. HTH.
--
Toomas Aas | toomas.aas at raad.tartu.ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/
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