On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 2:14 PM, John Clement jc@m4-p.com wrote:

Updating old CentOS 4 DNS servers to CentOS 5, one of our zones has a number of entries with underscores in.  Starting named results in the following error and named refusing to start.

masters/example.com.db:33: mail_server.example.com: bad owner name (check-names)

I've tried including

check-names master ignore;

in the options but this isn't making any difference.  I've read a lot of debate on whether underscores should be allowed, but for the time being we're stuck with these entries so I need to get this working.

Any thoughts?

Yes, don't use check-names or set it to warn. See chapter 06 of the ARM.

Or drop those names (although RFC 2181 allows those in labels, but it also makes clear, that not any label must be allowed as a host name).

Ralph