What Linux are you using?
I had RedHat 9, and I got a this problem where each time I restarted 'named', i.e.,
service named restart
I got Sopping Named Failed. The reason was that /var/run/named/named.pid was not being created because /var/run/named was owned by 'root' and 'service named restart' sets user to 'named'. I got that fixed by,
chown -R named.named /var/run/named
But this is not the reason why your 'named' daemon was failing,of course.
One possibility why your named is failing is because there is 'format' or syntax error in one or more lines in your named database.
When that line gets referenced during a process that's when your DNS server gives up.
In your zone files, fields must be separated by TABS or ^I (not spaces). Because of this the format or syntax error is not obvious to the eye under normal settings. For example, I have a line,
server IN A 203.7.132.57
when I load a file with 'vi file'.
The raw format looks like this,
server^I^IIN^I^IA^I^I203.7.132.57
where ^I represents a TAB-Character.
Now you can confirm that you have tabs separating your fields by using 'vi <filename>' and then issue this colon-command,
:set list
To restore, issue this colon-command,
:set nolist
Obviously, when you find spaces, replace with TABS.
Jared Pritchard wrote:
Hi,
Just experiencing some crazy problems with ‘named’ (dns).
Our web server (which is also our gateway to the Internet for our office machines) serves as a DNS and sporadically over the last couple of days, for no known reason, named keeps failing and every now and then (between 15 minutes to a few hours) it will just, stop. I restart it using ‘service named restart’ and it says that the shutdown of named failed, but startup is OK.
Originally (not knowing what the problem was) I reset our web server, so it’s not just some bug in startup, and we have made NO changes that should effect it’s workings at all.
Just weird. =/
I’ve looked through the cronjobs & there’s nothing that even comes close to the failure times, so I can’t see what the problem might be.
Has anyone experienced this sort of thing before, or have any idea what it might be?
When ‘named’ “fails”, it simply won’t let us view our website, or any other site on the net using domain names. IPs work fine.
Using Redhat 7.3 I think
Here is a quick dump of ‘rndc’ – (when named is working unfortunately, haven’t been here for last few failures)
*------------------------------------------------
[root]# rndc status
number of zones: 28
debug level: 0
xfers running: 0
xfers deferred: 0
soa queries in progress: 0
query logging is OFF
server is up and running
------------------------------------------------*
I have no idea how that’s going to help, but who knows? Not me = )
Thanks for any help.
* Cheers, *
Jared Pritchard
The Waterexchange Pty Ltd
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
