Re: DNS nslint error messages

[Brad Gilmer <bgilmer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Chuck and Gorgios for all your help.  I was able to resolve all of my problems with BIND and nslint.

For the archives, I am running FreeBSD 5.4 RELEASE on an IBM 330 e-series server.  I was getting numerous error messages when running nslint. The biggest problems were:
1) I have never configured BIND before, so this is all new stuff to me. Numerous errors from being a newbie in this area.

2) The FreeBSD distribution of BIND leaves some critical things out in the default installation (to be fair, maybe they are left out of all BIND9 installations - but maybe the FreeBSD community can do better than the original!).  For example, there is no note in the /etc/namedb/named.conf file that you should add a 'localhost' zone.  I am sure I will never forget this now that I have spent the better part of a week figuring it out, but it would be helpful if the sample named.conf included it.

3) The IPv6 stuff is turned on in named.conf by default, but I am not using IPv6 at all.  So it never occurred to me that complaints from nslint such as...

nslint: missing "a": localhost.org. -> 0.0.0.1

were being generated because of a bogus error in the default file /etc/namedb/master/host-v6.rev.  In frustration I finally did a grep for 0.0.0.1, and there it was in this file.  I fixed it by commenting out the IPv6 stuff in /etc/namedb/named.conf.

4) For other newbies, be aware that localhost. and localhost.EXAMPLE.COM are two different things.  In my system I specifically point both of them to 127.0.0.1, which results in this complaint from nslint...

nslint: 127.0.0.1 in use by localhost.EXAMPLE.COM. and localhost.

but it seems that this error is okay.  nslint is just telling you that you have two things pointing to the same IP address.

5) One more newbie comment - be sure to check /var/log/messages for errors.  nslint does not catch everything.  If you are pounding away making numerous changes, you can quickly check for log error messages by entering...

# rndc reload

This will cause BIND to re-read the zone files.

6) And one last thing - be sure to increment the serial number on the zone files to ensure that the new data is loaded.

Brad