01150b21:3: RCODE returned from query: ‘SERVFAIL’.

Came across an interesting problem after our F5 BigIP-VEs were victim to a storage failure in VMWare.  Certain zones couldn’t be modified or in some cases even viewed in ZoneRunner.  Since F5 doesn’t officially support its BIND backend, I knew I was likely on my own for a fix and began poking around /var/named/config/namedb were the files are stored.

[admin@f5bigip01:Active:In Sync] ~ # cd /var/named/config/namedb/
[admin@f5bigip01:Active:In Sync] namedb # ls -ls db.internal.32.30.10.in-addr.arpa.*
 4 -rw-r--r--. 1 named named 977 2017-08-21 12:53 db.internal.32.30.10.in-addr.arpa.
 4 -rw-r--r--. 1 named named 861 2017-08-19 12:06 db.internal.32.30.10.in-addr.arpa.~
12 -rw-r--r--. 1 named named 11302 2017-08-19 11:55 db.internal.32.30.10.in-addr.arpa..jnl

Took a guess that it’s the .jnl file that’s the problem.  So I decided to halt BIND, delete the file, and try again…

[admin@f5bigip01:Active:In Sync] ~ # bigstart stop zrd
[admin@f5bigip01:Active:In Sync] ~ # rm -f *..jnl
[admin@f5bigip01:zrd DOWN:In Sync] ~ # bigstart start zrd

Went back to ZoneRunner and was able to view and edit the zone just fine.