Re: How to get BIND to query the right server?

Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote in message news:<cdmg7j$1v2r$1@sf1.isc.org>...

> Neither of those seems right. I see:
>
> barmar $ dig gov ns @a.root-servers.net
>
> ; <<>> DiG 9.2.2 <<>> gov ns @a.root-servers.net
> ;; global options: printcmd
> ;; Got answer:
> ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 24758
> ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 7, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 7
>
> ;; QUESTION SECTION:
> ;gov. IN NS
>
> ;; ANSWER SECTION:
> gov. 172800 IN NS G.GOV.ZONEEDIT.COM.
> gov. 172800 IN NS F.GOV.ZONEEDIT.COM.

etc.

I also got a private e-mail suggesting that there's a problem with the
gov zone. I do appreciate both of you taking the time to respond.

Even if the problem lies somewhere else than with our server, though,
I'd still like to know if there's a way to work around the problem so
that we can access .gov sites. Since our Machine 1, and apparently
everyone else's machine, has no problem with this, there must be
something set up differently (in a cache?), and I'd like to know if
there's a way to rearrange things on Machine 2 in order to trick BIND
into working on .gov domains.

For example: Although my knowledge of BIND is really sketchy, it seems
that /var/named/root is some sort of cache (is this correct?). Is
there a way to make things work by shutting down named, editing this
file manually, and restarting? Or if this isn't the right file to
edit, is there a different one?

(Additional information, if it helps: named.conf on Machine 2 contains
the following:

zone "." {
type slave;
file "root";
masters {
// NS1.VRX.NET.
199.166.24.1;
};
};

A couple weeks ago, in response to a problem in which BIND on Machine
2 failed on every domain and the syslog contained the messages:

secondary zone "" expired
No root nameservers for class IN

in a desperate attempt to make things work, I changed it to

zone "." {
type hint;
file "root";
};

and everything started working. I changed it back after we started
having problems with .gov, but that didn't help the problem, although
we're not experiencing the problems we had two weeks ago.)

Thanks for any help you can provide.

-- Adam