Failed to start BIND : Unknown error

Question

I am using Debian Linux 5.0 with Webmin and Virtualmin. Everything works fine except the BIND DNS Server. It says

Failed to start BIND : Unknown error.

Any ideas? I've googled about this problem and found some answers, but didn't help me. I still couldn't start it.

Thanks in advance for any help! Gabe

Answer 1

Increase the logging level, put this on named.conf:

 logging {severity debug;};

More info about logging directive:

http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch7/logging.html

Answer 2

This error is not coming from BIND, but from the startup script or wrapper.

Try running BIND manually, from a root prompt, with:

named -g -c /dev/null

If this starts, it means BIND is installed and working properly. The next step is to find out what configuration file it may be using. You can try leaving off the -c /dev/null part and seeing what happens. If it starts, there is a config file somewhere that it found and loaded.

If no file is found, use the -c option and point it at your named.conf file specifically.

If those steps all work, then I would check the path that your wrapper script tries to run to ensure that it has the correct one for named.