Comments on: Mac OS X Server: Remove an errant Zone from DNS.

By: jlorre

jlorre — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:21:00 +0000

I also found that typing long information in the HINFO and TXT fields can totaly stop DNS in OSX 10.6.6 from working (without any warnings that I noticed). Once I removed all HINFO and TXT lines from /private/var/named/zones/db.LE.BE.zone.apple my DNS suddenly worked again. (for that i used: grep -v “IN HINFO” db.LE.BE.zone.apple | grep -v “IN TXT” >tempfile.txt; cp tempfile.txt db.LE.BE.zone.apple ) but first make a backup of db.LE.BE.zone.apple to keep the deleted information.
The RFC mention a maximum length of 40 characters limited to letters,digits and dashes for HINFO fields. See e.g. http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt

By: jlorre

jlorre — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:11:59 +0000

i had a similar problem with unexpectedly disapperaing and reappearing of zones and their content. This trouble started after I had pasted information in software Info field of a machine record.
It seems to me that carriage returns are refused in this field when TYPING, but the carriage returns are not intercepted when you PASTE them in the field.
Result of a pasted CR is that the resulting textfile which stores the configuration is actually saved in a corrupt way (i.e. all A records seem normally 1 line, and the record where the CR was pasted into is saved as two lines.
When I edited the textfile to remove the surplus CarriageReturn, then suddenly I did see my lost zone back with all machines in it.

Morale: do not paste something with newlines or carriage returns in the DNS fields

By: David Apimerika

David Apimerika — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:39:18 +0000

Works for me.

As for SmooveP’s comment. It’s horses for courses. If you want to tinker with your own rolled DNS config, then fine, use Linux. If you’re an Admin that just wants a simple DNS to work, then the Mac OS X server Server Admin approach is fine.

What’s pretty cool is that once you have a basic setup in place using the GUI tool, you can then go in and modify the files themselves to suit. And hey – it’s named! How’s that for familiarity to a UNIX/Linux admin.

By: Sector-mac

Sector-mac — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:59:51 +0000

Thanks for this. I was banging my head against the wall over this and this fixed it for me.

By: SmooveP

SmooveP — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:00:08 +0000

Mate,
Just had the exact same problem, and now I can’t add any zones. you press save and they vanish. I have to say OSX Server is a crock of shite. I’m using RHEL for my netsevices and just want to setop OpenDirectory – hence need to have a local DNS server. Crap.