I had something rather interesting happen to both of my internal DNS boxes last night at almost the exact same time. Both of these boxes are Solaris with the same build and patches. At a little after 4 AM PST I get the following in the logs -

Dec 19 04:08:24 nms2 named[229]: [ID 866145 daemon.crit] message c:809 REQUIRE(*rdataset == 0) failed
Dec 19 04:08:24 nms2 named[229]: [ID866145 daemon.crit] exiting (due to assertation failure)


the other box was time stamped 5 seconds later with the same messages. Now I'm not a huge DNS person (that's usually our network folks but since I was the only one in this morning I got to "fix" it) so I don't really know what this all means. What is the assertation failure and why did it affect both boxes at the same time? I looked through my IDS logs and firewall logs for anything around that time and nothing seemded to correspond with those times stamps so I'm not sure if someone "attacked" them or if they just both failed for the same reason at the same time. Neither of these boxes have a connection to the outside world and are only our internal DNS servers, we have external DNS servers for outside communication.

I've determined that the named daemon stopped on both servers and all I had to do was restart it, but that doesn't tell me WHY it happened in the first place.

Any ideas as to what could have been up with these machines?




El Diablo