*BSD News Article 74570


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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!ccteakle
From: ccteakle@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (Chris Teakle)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: named 4.9.4 - "Too many open files"
Date: 24 Jul 1996 10:36:23 GMT
Organization: University of Queensland
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One of our nameservers (bind-4.9.4, FreeBSD-2.1.0) recently had an attack
of very bad behaviour. It started denying existence of hosts in certain
domains for which it is a secondary, which led to problems such as the
bouncing of correctly-addressed email.

I did not have the opportunity to examine the system in this state -
it was rebooted before I discovered what had happened, and it has not
(yet) happened again. It appears that for each domain for which the
problem occurred there were syslogged errors like this:

    Jul 23 06:10:28 krefti named[64]: cltr.zone.bak: Too many open files
    Jul 23 06:10:28 krefti named[64]: cltr.edu.zone.bak: Too many open files

Does anyone know what is the likely cause of this problem?

The host in question runs virtually nothing apart from named and has ample
CPU and memory (64Mb and not swapping).
It secondaries 639 domains, all from one other host. Both it and the host
it secondaries from are running bind-4.9.4 named with BIND_NOTIFY enabled.

----
Chris Teakle
Prentice Centre, University of Qld, Australia