Name Resolution

[TidyTrax]

Hello,

I have a problem with an AIX box which seems to periodically lose the ability to resolve names via DNS - which is hosted on a Windows 2000 Server box. Every othe machine on the network can still resolve. As a windows engineer it looks like the DNS client service is not running, but as i am not an AIX expert - all i really know how to look at are the resolv.conf and netsvc.conf files - both look fine - i have tried recreating them. The only thing that seems to fix this is a reboot. This is obviously not an acceptable fix as it happens approx once a week. Does anyone have an pointers for me??

Matt

 

[mrn]

Can you supply the following

AIX Version (Use oslevel -r)
How long until name lookup fails (Is it at reg intervals)
Anything in error log (Use errpt -a|more)


Mike

"Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters."

 

[khalidaaa]

ok i'm thinking loudly now! is it possible that somehow the record in the windows dns expires and that's why the naming resolution stops until you reregister when rebooting the server? just chase the windows admin for that

Regards
Khalid

 

[spamly]

I've been in a similar situation.

Have your Windows 2000 folks look into DNS patches. About a year ago I saw a similar symptom on all of our UNIX systems. Windows systems were resolving fine, but UNIX systems were not. It all started AFTER a Windows DNS server upgrade and was resolved after Windows DNS patch. I don't know if this is exactly the same problem, but you could check it out.

 

[hfaix]

When this happens, can you ping the DNS server(s) by IP from the AIX server?

 

[spamly]

I was able to ping all three of our DNS servers. All DNS resolutions were failing and/or hanging.

 

[TidyTrax]

Hi guys thanks for the responses.

1) Aix version is 5100-05
2) There doesnt appear to be a fixed time pattern, seems to be intermittent, but approx once per week
3) There seems to be a software program terminatted abnormally error around the times that the name res failure occurs

I will look into the patching side of things thanks.

Yes i can ping the DNS servers and connect on port 53.

 

[millsra]

The software that terminates is it named? If so what we had to do when we introduced Microsoft DNS into our infrastructure and broke it was to add a script to the crontab that would go out and check to see if named was running and if not then we restarted it. We also made our business critical servers their own primary dns server then secondary out the the other junk that was put into place. It has been a real mess but it is what we have to live with.