What does "stale: impossible condition" mean?

[Victoria Leung]

System running HP-UX11.0
There is an error in /var/adm/syslog/syslog./log

May 20 22:05:10 cndns1 named[9165]: stale: impossible condition

The named daemon was killed by system... :(

What does this error mean?

[Ermin Borovac]

Check your named configuration file. Assuming it's version 8 or 9, are there any zones defined without type (master, slave, stub, hint)?

[Victoria Leung]

There was a misconfiguration in named.conf, with the same zone defined twice.

Do you mean that if this zone is hitted, named will be killed by system?

[Ermin Borovac · Accepted solution]

It just means that named found inconsistency in its configuration file that it couldn't handle so it panicked and died.