named error messages

[Jeganathan Venkitasamy]

syslog file contains error messages like
"
Oct 26 06:57:10 nbcgen03 named[840]: Err/TO getting serial# for "197.3.in-addr.arpa"
Oct 26 06:58:10 nbcgen03 tftpd[20940]: Timeout (no requests in 10 minutes)
Oct 26 06:58:27 nbcgen03 named-xfer[3137]: connect(3.3.45.8) for zone 197.3.in-addr.arpa f
ailed: Connection timed out
Oct 26 07:12:10 nbcgen03 named[840]: Err/TO getting serial# for "nbc.com"
Oct 26 07:12:10 nbcgen03 named[840]: Err/TO getting serial# for "197.3.in-addr.arpa"
Oct 26 07:12:10 nbcgen03 named[840]: Err/TO getting serial# for "nbc.ge.com"

"


Do you know what this means? Does this means some networking issue? I run HP-UX 11.0 in this box. We have BMC patrol for enterprise management. It did not report any sort of error.

Thanks & regards
Jeganathan

[Kofi ARTHIABAH · Accepted solution]

Jeganathan:

The problem you are having is a misconfiguration of the nameserver (named) on nbcgen03. The messages indicate the nbcgen03 (is supposed to be a secondary nameserver) is unable to connect to the primary in order to do a zone transfer.

This might be as a result of a number of things:

1. the primary nameserver has not been configured to allow/recognise nbcgen03 as a secondary nameserver (in which case, you should edit the /etc/named.boot file and add an entry for nbcgen03 )
2. You have a firewall that prevents nbcgen03 from contacting your nameserver - in this case get your fw admin to allow udp/53 and tcp/53 to and from the nameserver and nbcgen03

If you want to prevent these errors, and nbcgen03 is NOT a secondary to the domain, you should edit the /etc/named.boot and comment out the lines that say something like
secondary nbc.com 3.3.45.8 zone/nbc.com
secondary 197.3.in-addr.arpa 3.3.45.8 zone/197.3
(in named config files, comments are started with ; semicolons in the first column)

then restart named (/sbin/init.d/named stop; /sbin/init.d/named start)

BTW. If that machine is on the internet, you might want to disable tftp

Good luck

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

You NIS is having problem, check to see if the gated daemon is running. Is your DNS server up? Do a network check on your DNS server/clients.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

You NIS is having problem, check to see if the gated daemon is running. Is your DNS server up? Do a network check on your DNS server/clients.

[Jeganathan Venkitasamy]

Hi,

Thanks guys.
Kofi's reply has some answer.
It was a problem in communication between secondary and primary DNS server.
But it looks more like some sort of intermittent network problem.
We don't have any firewall in between primary and secondary. And primary accept requests from this seconday ( nbcgen03 ).I tried to pull zone database manually using named-xfer, it worked fine.
We are dealing with networks folks over here.

Thanks again for your help.

Regards,
Jeganathan