SERVFAIL ERROR

[tyronep]

hi,

we are using two nameservers and we seem to intermittendly get SERVFAIL errors. We using BIND9, and we constantly have to restart the named process even thought it is running at the time.

when doing a basic nslookup i get the following error:
nslookup 196.7.0.142
Server: 196.7.0.138
Address: 196.7.0.138#53

** server can't find 142.0.7.196.in-addr.arpa: SERVFAIL

#dig uunet.co.za any

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> uunet.co.za any
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 38905
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;uunet.co.za. IN ANY

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 196.7.0.138#53(196.7.0.138)
;; WHEN: Wed Mar 19 13:06:49 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 2

anyone have any ideas?

thanks
tyronep

 

[elgrandeperro]

Both those are housed at
ns1.iafrica.com internet address = 196.7.0.139
ns2.iafrica.com internet address = 196.7.142.133

My guess is that one or both of those servers are hosed in some fashion. When it occurs, try and directly query those servers using dig or nslookup and see if one or both are returning SERVFAIL.

SERVFAIL should be an operational error, like disk full or out of memory or IO failure.

eugene