[Gllug] named

[William Palfreman]

On 26 Jan 2002, Nix wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, William Palfreman uttered the following:
> >                                             Last time I administered a
> > production nameserver Bind 9.1.3 was the latest version, but it was so
> > unreliable thet real people used 8.x.y (the latest one).
>
> I'm curious; what were the unreliabilities? I'm running it here; not
> really `production' because there aren't many people doing name lookups
> through it, but... I have seen no unreliabilities yet.

It was maddening.  It would run ok for a while - maybe a week or two, then
something would happen.  Maybe one particular domain would stop resoving,
or it wouldn't answer request froms certain addresses, or it would just
stop and not restart.  It was probably taking some of my time ever other
day eventually, which is the last thing you want on something like that.
It was all because I hadn't done that before (that is, run a produciton
primary nameserver that was being set up from scratch on a newly delegated
domain) and Imade the mistake of believing the documentation.  First of
all, it and everyone said to go the the isc site and get the latest latest
version, the one the site said to run.   So I did that, which was  bind
9.1.1 then.  Massive warning on the site not to use 9.1.0 etc.  Further
into the documentation it said that bind-9 needed a 2.4 kernel when run on
Linux so that it could do posix threading.  (The may just have been worded
badly in the docs. I haven't used Linux 2.4 or Bind 9 since this
experience.  So, again following the documentation I upgraded the
machine to the current stable linux kernel according to
www.kernel.org, which was then 2.4.2.

Anyway, it just never worked properly.  It would periodically die for no
reason, it would stop answering things on UDP 53 on eth0 for no reason and
ultimately need an init 6, it would incosistantly answer reqeusts on
localhost or not do so.  Anyway, I just got so fed up of it that i just
nuked it in the end and went back to bind 8.2.3 and 2.2.19 (both the
current linux and bind version then) and from then on it worked perfectly.
I don't think I ever restarted named in anger from then on, and the wole
experience has meant I haven't been willing to use either Linux 2.4
seriously or Bind 9 at all since.

Now I am much more cautious about newer versions and have stopped using
Redhat altogether, in favour of a mixture of Debian and FreeBSD.  When I
saw that redhat had started shipping Bind 9.1.3 by default on RH7.1 I
never went back to it.

-- 
William Palfreman


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