BIND9 and empty responses

[David Bandel]

Folks,

OK, I administer a number of systems, including those of my Internet
provider.  He has 2 BIND 9.3.1 boxes (one is Debian on Sparc, the
other is RH or some derivative thereof).

He has 98 domains.  Today, for some strange reason, two of those
domains stopped responding.  That is, you could dig, but you'd only
get an empty set returned.  Not no reponse, just literally an empty
answer.

Finally put those two on the slave as masters and all is working.

Things I looked at/for:
1.  problems with named.conf (domains above and below responded fine,
and all syntax looks good -- nothing in the logs indicating an error).
2.  permissions on files/directories where the zone files were located
-- no problems there
3.  possible line termination problem (i.e., someone edited them in
DOS).  No, not there either, all had UNIX terminations (i.e., \n).

If anyone has any ideas at all, I'm all ears.  dig +trace SOA @host
domain.com showed all normal, just a blank line where the SOA should
be.  I've gone over the files until I'm blind.

Got me baffled.

TIA,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
            - Nemesis Air Racing Team motto