Environment
Open Enterprise Server 2018 (OES 2018) Linux
Situation
Novell DNS won't start if the options sections is too big. This is usually caused by lots of zones or really long zone names.
Resolution
Fixed in OES2018 Update 2 (novell-bind-9.7.3-0.32.10.x86_64.rpm)
You can work around the issue by removing custom settings from the DNS Server object, removing the forwarding list, and unassigning zones from the server.
Cause
If the options section is too large it gets truncated and the end is missing from named.conf. After novell-named fails to start /etc/opt/novell/named/named.conf will have an incomplete options section at the top.