Invalid SOA in 1 zone causes full failure in pdns

[gizahNL]

• Program: Authoritative
• Issue type: Bug report

both version 4.0 and latest 4.1 (from debian repo's)

Short description

Invalid data within the SOA record in MySQL DB causes the full pdns server to crash, and not come back up due to repeatedly failing to load the record/zone.
Syslog mentions the following:
Feb 15 15:22:23 services-03 pdns_server[6907]: Exiting because communicator thread died with STL error: stoul; (invalid argument during std::stoul); data was "ns1.redacted.nl."

Environment

• Operating system: Debian 9.8
• Software version: pdns-server 4.1.6-1pdns.stretch
• Software source: Debian repo's

Steps to reproduce

Insert invalid data into the SOA field for an authoritave zone i.e. (the data that caused the issue in our case):
| 159811 | 7036 | bestaatniet.local | SOA | SOA - ns1.redacted.nl. hostmaster.redacted.nl. 2019021500 28800 7200 604800 3600 3600 | 3600 | 0 | 1550240479 | 0 | NULL | 1 |
(NOTE: the contents column contains 'SOA -', the result of an unlucky copy paste error)

Expected behaviour

While db-record validation is not the responsibility of pdns one would expect that invalid data does not crash and burn the entire server; ideally only the zone in question should be broken.

Actual behaviour

The entire pdns daemon crashes and fails to return.