Solution to slave zone transfer problem (at least in my case)

[Frank Saxton]

Thanks for the response Kevin!  After about 4 days and reading literally
hundreds of forum posts, web pages and so on, I finally figured it out with
a clue from someone who posted something about this subject.  This really
ought to be a FAQ item IMO since literally legions of people have
apparently slugged it out trying to solve this problem over time.  The
"responses" to these questions are usually something vague along the lines
of "there's a problem with named.conf" or "you have a permissions problem". 
Duh... that may indeed have been the case with the other thousand or so
people who had this problem,  but with over 20 years of *NIX Systems
Engineering experience, I think I know how to set up file permissions.

Anyway, I was getting the classic "permissions denied" messages same as
everyone else.  With named debug turned on, I was seeing write deny
messages for /dev/sda3 (/var) but nothing more informational than that.

I am not a DNS person and I don't know when the /var/named/slaves scheme
came along.  I am using Bind 9.2.4.  But this, not "file permissions" is
what bit me.

On the DNS slave, you need to set zone, file "slave/zonename"; not just file
"zonename";  THANK YOU CHRIS!!!!!!

Then you need to (apparently) copy your zone files into /var/named/slaves
making them 664 and owned and grouped by named.

Once I got it to work, I didn't do a lot of testing to figure out all of the
little pieces so you might be able to get away with a different mask or
ownerships.  But if you're having this problem and the condescending "your
files aren't writeable" responses aren't helping, try this.

Why named can't see the files in chroot on a slave is anyone's guess.  My
symlinks are right and my file protections are right and everything was
indeed writeable.  Perhaps this was fixed in later releases of bind.

Anyway, I hope this information saves some time for others who get dragged
into this snake pit.