The MacDeskBlog

MacDesktops is up once again after a very strange DNS outage.

<GeekStuff>Yesterday, I installed four innocuous looking updates on my mail/DNS server using Software Update: Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 (v1.0), Airport Utility Software Update 2009-002 (v5.42), Safari (v4.0.1), and iLife Support (v9.0.3). The installs required a server restart. No big deal. When the server came back up, everything seemed to be fine. But this morning, my wife’s iPhone wouldn’t fetch mail. By the time I got to work, my iPhone wouldn’t either. When I finished up work, I finally got a chance to determine the scope of the problem, at which point I saw that Server Admin showed that DNS was running (green light and “DNS Service is: Running” message) but also said “Start Time: Not Started”. Very suspicious. Checking the log revealed that DNS shutdown at 13:27 yesterday after a series of zone transfer denials. I rebooted the server and headed home for a closer look. Running named in the foreground told me “/etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple:80: zone ’0.0.127.in-addr.arpa’: already exists previous definition: /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple:63″. Huh? I didn’t catch that immediately, but 3 minutes later when I tried again, it sunk in. So, I popped open publicView.conf.apple, ignored the “// PLEASE DO NOT MANUALLY MODIFY THIS FILE!” warning. And found the definitions for zone “0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.”. Sure enough, there were two of them. Not knowing which one to comment out, I picked the first one, saved the changes, and tried to launch named. It worked. I then looked up the error message about zone transfer denials, and figured that “Allows zone transfers” should be enabled (I suspect that I broke that a few months ago when I upgraded from 10.4 Server to 10.5 Server).</GeekStuff>

I have no idea which of the four updates messed up my publicView.conf.apple file. But the problem is fixed now and DNS has propagated to the secondary DNS.