Ahh, I knew I had read that exact message somewhere, but wasn't able to find it when I was looking for it.
I found these 2 related posts:
http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=24754
http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=23916
I am PMing froglok23 and rojadruid in case either of them still read these forums and have any input into getting this working the way I want. My guess is that they got it setup and working, but that they never noticed that if a zone crashes, the world server doesn't know which port range to assign to which zone server. And that this causes the zone to be unavailable.
I am trying to get a linux server up and running to see if it works any differently as far as multiple zone servers go. Windows definitely has issues as far as I have seen.
The main problem is that the setting in the config for ports on the world server PC are the only ports that the world server will will ever create new zones on. So, even if you set a separate range of ports in the config on your zone only server, that port range pretty much just gets ignored.
Hopefully one of the guys I am PMing will have a solution and will reply here or PM me with it. I would love to get this working.