[Pdns-users] What does "had X timeouts" on a slave mean and how to debug?

Joshua M. Boniface joshua at boniface.me
Fri Sep 8 00:39:22 UTC 2017


For the next person who might hit this situation:

The problem ultimately ended up being a misconfiguration on my side. 
Specifically, to work around some issues with 1-to-1 NAT I had seen 
previously, I had added records for my router local IP addresses to the 
'supermasters' table on the slaves, the idea being that reflected NAT 
requests would come from those IPs. Little did I know, however, that 
PowerDNS will actually try to send the SOA requests for pending NOTIFY'd 
zones to the IPs listed in the 'supermasters' table, rather than 
actually resolve the A records of the NS records. This explains the 
intermittent behaviour - sometimes it would pick the right IP, other 
times it would pick the router IP, and of course the router address 
wouldn't respond to the SOA request. I hadn't actually seen this in my 
packet captures however because I was filtering specifically for the 
master IP address, and of course the SOA request packets destined for 
the router IP wouldn't show up there!

After removing the bad entries in the supermasters table, I'm no longer 
seeing either the reflected NAT issue, nor my inconsistent AXFRs, so I'd 
consider this solved. Thanks specifically to Habbie on IRC #powerdns who 
helped point me in the right direction (specifically that SOA requests 
happened before AXFRs so I knew what I was looking for).

Let this be a warning to anyone else trying a similar setup behind NAT!

Thanks,
Joshua Boniface

On 2017-09-06 6:12 PM, Joshua M. Boniface wrote:
>
> Hello list!
>
> I'm experiencing a problem with my PowerDNS slave machines not 
> performing AXFRs when notified by the master of a zone reload, and 
> I've been unable to find any satisfactory answers. First, some of the 
> pertinent questions:
>
>   * What PowerDNS or dnsdist version you are using
>     /PowerDNS 4.0.3/
>   * What backends you use (gMySQL, BIND etc)
>     /gMySQL/
>   * If you are using DNSSEC
>     /Yes, the zones in question are signed on the master/
>   * Operating system it is running on
>     /Debian Stretch (9.1)/
>   * Where you got the binary from, i.e. did you compile it yourself
>     (which compiler, including version), from your distribution or
>     ports tree etc
>     /Using version from official Debian Stretch repositories/
>
> The specific problem I'm having can be summed up by the following two 
> log lines on the slave:
>
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 2 slave domains need checking, 0 queued for AXFR
> > Sep 06 14:31:36 Received serial number updates for 0 zones, had 2 
> timeouts
>
> I am triggering updates via the DHCP DDNS facility documented here: 
> https://doc.powerdns.com/md/authoritative/dnsupdate/#dns-update-how-to-setup-dyndnsrfc2136-with-dhcpd, 
> however this problem also occurs occasionally though less frequently 
> when I manually update a zone in the MySQL backend and trigger a 
> "pdnsutil increase-serial <domain>" followed by a "pdns_control reload 
> <domain>". This is occurring with many domains as well, though due to 
> the DHCP DDNS I'm focusing on only two.
>
> I would expect zero timeouts, however at least 50% of the time both 
> relevant zone transfers time out as shown in the log above. 40% of the 
> time one times out, and only 10% of the time (based on about two dozen 
> tests) do both zones AXFR as expected on both slave hosts. The timeout 
> time is always exactly 3 seconds after the NOTIFY is received, and 
> I've not found any setting in the documentation to increase this time.
>
> I did a packet capture on both sides of the transaction (both master 
> and slave), and I see the NOTIFY packet sent by the master and 
> acknowledged on the slave, however when I see the timeouts I never see 
> the slave send any sort of AXFR request as I would expect. The 
> notifies are received without error to both hosts every time. Given 
> the lack of relevant information in these I have not included them.
>
> There is no firewalling or other network interruptions between the 
> master and slave and they are on the same broadcast domain. And as 
> mentioned, sometimes at least one domain succeeds and I see the AXFR 
> request sent from the slave to the master. This occurs intermittently 
> between both of my slave machines, so this does not appear to be 
> network related. I also confirmed that there are no errors related to 
> the MySQL backend on the master.
>
> Increasing the loglevel to 9+ on both sides does not reveal any 
> further information as to the timeout. So ultimately, my question is: 
> *[tl;dr]* What exactly does "had X timeouts" mean on the slave (i.e. 
> what is timing out), and what can I do to diagnose the cause or 
> prevent it from happening?
>
> Here is the full log from the master with loglevel=9 (with the main 
> domain changed here to `domain.tld` for privacy purposes; as 
> previously mentioned this is occurring for multiple domains anyways) 
> for a sample run. In this particular case, my second slave server 
> (10.9.0.66) properly responded with AXFR requests for both updated 
> domains, however the first slave server (10.9.0.65) did not. This is 
> fairly consistent behaviour for me regarding this problem - sometimes 
> the first responds with one or both, other times the second responds, 
> but almost invariably one zone on one host does not AXFR.
>
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> 2 domains for which we are master need notifications
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Queued notification of domain 'i.domain.tld' to 10.9.0.65:53
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Queued notification of domain 'i.domain.tld' to 10.9.0.66:53
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Queued notification of domain '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' to 10.9.0.65:53
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Queued notification of domain '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' to 10.9.0.66:53
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> gmysql Connection successful. Connected to database 'dns' on 
> 'db.domain.tld'. [3 repetitions removed]
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Remote 10.9.0.66 wants '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa|SOA', do = 1, bufsize = 
> 1680: packetcache MISS
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Remote 10.9.0.66 wants 'i.domain.tld|SOA', do = 0, bufsize = 512: 
> packetcache MISS
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> AXFR of domain '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' initiated by 10.9.0.66
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> AXFR of domain '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' allowed: client IP 10.9.0.66 is 
> in allow-axfr-ips
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> AXFR of domain 'i.domain.tld' initiated by 10.9.0.66
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> AXFR of domain 'i.domain.tld' allowed: client IP 10.9.0.66 is in 
> allow-axfr-ips
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> gmysql Connection successful. Connected to database 'dns' on 
> 'db.domain.tld'. [10 repetitions removed]
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> AXFR of domain 'i.domain.tld' to 10.9.0.66 finished
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> gmysql Connection successful. Connected to database 'dns' on 
> 'db.domain.tld'.
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> Done signing: 6425.07 sigs/s,
> > Sep 06 14:31:33 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:33 
> AXFR of domain '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' to 10.9.0.66 finished
> > Sep 06 14:31:34 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:34 
> Removed from notification list: 'i.domain.tld' to 10.9.0.65:53 (was 
> acknowledged)
> > Sep 06 14:31:34 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:34 
> Removed from notification list: 'i.domain.tld' to 10.9.0.66:53 (was 
> acknowledged)
> > Sep 06 14:31:34 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:34 
> Removed from notification list: '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' to 10.9.0.65:53 
> (was acknowledged)
> > Sep 06 14:31:34 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:34 
> Removed from notification list: '0.9.10.in-addr.arpa' to 10.9.0.66:53 
> (was acknowledged)
> > Sep 06 14:31:36 dns.i.domain.tld pdns_server[30635]: Sep 06 14:31:36 
> No master domains need notifications
>
> I appreciate any information or advice anyone can provide, and I am 
> able to reproduce this consistently should more testing be required!
>
> Thanks,
> Joshua Boniface
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pdns-users mailing list
> Pdns-users at mailman.powerdns.com
> https://mailman.powerdns.com/mailman/listinfo/pdns-users

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.powerdns.com/pipermail/pdns-users/attachments/20170907/bc134c84/attachment.html>


More information about the Pdns-users mailing list