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Son of the Wai-Pan
Asked: 2012-06-21 21:42:41 +0800 CST

How do I use /etc/named.conf to configure named on Ubuntu 12.04?

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I've been reading a bit on how to configure my own DNS server. I have a host of questions but this is the first that came up:

  1. I edited /etc/named.conf and created the appropriate zone files.
  2. I tried to restart bind9 with a service bind9 restart.
  3. A quick grep of syslog shows that it's not running with the changes I specified in /etc/named.conf.

How do I get /etc/named.conf to be loaded?

(I gave up after a while and after looking at the output from named-checkconf -p, I started editing files in /var/cache/bind as well as /etc/bind/)

domain-name-system bind named-conf

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Running service bind9 restart should work. For bind9 on Ubuntu v11.10, the default location for named.conf is /etc/bind/named.conf not /etc/named.conf.

    In general, the init script (/etc/init.d/bind9) should point you to where the configuration file resides.

    For bind9 on Ubuntu v11.10, there is a bind settings file at /etc/default/bind9 but it is only used to set command line options when starting named - which shouldn't matter, unless someone edited this file to add an argument to redirect where named.conf resides.

    NOTE: I wouldn't move the configuration file away from its default location without good reason nor would I edit what is in /var/named directly (isn't this autocreated).

    Another thing to check is: have you tried service bind9 stop and then confirmed that named is no longer running and then started (with service bind9 start) it again?

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  2. Yeah. I have noticed that the named man page is completely wrong on ubuntu 10.04 about the config file. It seems to actually be /etc/bind/named.conf rather than what the man page states (/etc/named.conf). I figured this out by reading the system log when bind9 starts and noticing that it was built with sysconfdir=/etc/bind

    I hope someone notices the error and fixes in at some point.

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