DNS and running 2 months then stop working

Hi,

I have setup my own public DNS...everyhting is fine within 1 or 2 months and then, the "communication" between my servers and the public world seems to stop working ....
I need to re-install another machine...

Logged on hte DNS server, everything seems to be OK
I can restart the DNS server..
I noticed that I have a message like rndc.conf key not found...

I using absolutely NO encryption system for updating the server.. I just want to keep my server for the outside word..
- Any idea of what could be the problem ?
- What kind of test should I do to test the comm between my server and parent servers ?.

Thanks

I'm assuming it's BIND. First make sure the process is actually running. Start named and then check /var/log/messages and look for the logs from named (or also do "ps -ef|grep named"). See if it's actually starting or if the logs are telling you something is wrong.

If named is starting fine, try "dig @127.0.0.1 yourdomain.com." and see what that returns. That should at least start to point you in the right direction.