I’ve been working around a Bind problem for sometime now. Bind is a name server program used to resolve hostnames to IP addresses. For example, before your browser could display this post, your machine contacted your name server that in turn contacted my machine running bind to find out the IP address for this site’s web server, since only the name server on my machine and its backup are authoritative for www.mrambler.com. Now this doesn’t always happen because name servers cache name resolutions for a specified period of time. If you just visited yesterday, then your name server would have likely just responded with the IP address it gave you yesterday rather than bother to lookup and query mine. (All of this is, of course, somewhat simplified.)

Anyway, on to my trouble: I’ve only defined the mrambler.com zone in a public/external view. I also have an internal view to resolve hostnames for my internal network, none of which are in the mrambler.com domain. So when I try to look up mrambler.com from inside, I get a “can’t find mrambler.com: Server failed” error. Looking in the server log, I see “lame-servers: lame server resolving ‘mrambler.com’ (in ‘mrambler.com’?)”. Lame eh? A lame server is a server that should be authoritative for a domain but for some reason isn’t. So here’s what I think the problem is: My internal machine needs to resolve the mrambler.com name so it contacts my name server. My name server sees that it is receiving the request from an internal machine and thus allows the query. Now since that view doesn’t have mrambler.com as a zone, it performs a lookup. Now here’s the troublesome bit — that lookup is coming from my public IP address which is the same IP address that mrambler.com’s name server resolves to. So it is probably considered lame since a name server is requesting the name server of a domain that it is supposed to be authoritative for. (Got it?) Unfortunately I don’t know of a clean solution yet. I certainly don’t want to duplicate my zone files for both zones. Any ideas? Also, I welcome general name server questions.