rndc and Bind 9

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Lisa" == Lisa Burke <lburke at once.com> writes:

    Lisa> After successfully installing bind 9.0.1 on a Solaris 6 box,
    Lisa> I am having trouble reloading it with rndc.  I understand
    Lisa> that it is only supposed to support "reload" right now, but
    Lisa> I can't even get it to that point. 

    Lisa> Named functions fine, there's nothing in /var/adm/messages.

This is disturbing. You should at least be seeing the name server's
start up messages getting logged somewhere. Could syslogd be dead or
configured to put the name server's messages elsewhere? Or do you mean
there are no error messages from the name server in this log file?

    Lisa> I'm wondering is it the port itself?  I just added port 753
    Lisa> to /etc/services and I certainly can't telnet to it (from
    Lisa> the host itself).

The control socket uses port 953 by default. This explains why your
telnet attempts fail, but not why rndc gets "can't connect" errors.
Its connect() calls are failing ECONNREFUSED which suggests there
isn't a TCP listener on the chosen port number. So either the running
name server was unable to create the socket or else knew nothing about
it. Either way there should be an error in the logs because the system
call failed or your server couldn't parse the controls{} statement.

The config files you showed look OK. Can you use lsof - a great tool!
- to find out which files and sockets the name server is using? Maybe
you've started some other name server instead of BIND9? This might
account for the absence of log entries from the name server too. Or
has BIND9 read a different named.conf file from the one you showed?

PS Adding this port number to /etc/services isn't needed by the name
server. As far as I can see there's no standard name for this service
or a call to getservbyname() for it in the code. I don't have an entry
for it in the file on my systems and BIND9 runs just fine. However
it's a good idea to add an entry to /etc/services just to remind you
that something has claimed that port number.