BIND DNS down and not starting

BIND or named is one of the most widely used Domain Name System (DNS) service on Linux Servers. What is BIND? It’s an acronym which breaks to: BIND = Berkeley Internet Name Domain. This server software consists of many components, such as nameserver daemon (named) and a number of utilities (e.g. dig, host, named-checkconf, named-compilezone, dnssec-signzone, etc.) and the libraries (e.g. libbind).

BIND is a well-known stable software, but sometimes things going wrong and we are facing to BIND failures. Today we will describe zone file error scenario.

Got the server with DNS failure, named service is down and starting returns nothing. What to do?

First of all request the service status.

[root@hostserver ~]# service named status

Output:

rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#953: connection refused
named is stopped

We are applying restarting via command:

[root@hostserver ~]# service named restart

But named service is still down. In this case we should find the error of BIND non-starting. Try to activate the error listing by command:

[root@hostserver ~]# service named configtest

We are getting the following output:

...skipped... 
dns_master_load: /var/named/memrr.com:11: mail.memrr.com: CNAME and other data
dns_master_load: /var/named/memrr.com:14: www.memrr.com: CNAME and other data
zone memrr.com/IN: loading from master file /var/named/memrr.com failed: CNAME and other data
zone memrr.com/IN: not loaded due to errors.
...skipped... 

Great! We now see that domain memrr.com has an error in zone-file.

We will fix or remove the bad zone-file and apply restarting again.

[root@hostserver ~]# service named configtest

[root@hostserver ~]# service named restart
Stopping named:                                            [  OK  ]
Starting named:                                            [  OK  ]

Amazing! All services are now working perfectly.