Does named/BIND log startup errors?

Question

Does named log startup errors if so what is the default path?

The Wikipedia page for BIND speak of a configuration file verification tool - does anyone know of this?

Answer 1

most daemons log to /var/log/daemon. errors sometimes are also logged to /var/log/messages. you can check this by looking at the syslog configuration file /etc/syslog.conf.

the configcheck util for BIND is named-checkconf. it's a bit tricky, if you run your BIND chrooted.

first start with:

named-checkconf

to check the zone files also:

named-checkconf -z

in a chrooted environment try this:

named-checkconf -t /var/named -z

Answer 2

BIND will write startup errors to syslog.

Hence the logs will appear wherever your syslog.conf says they should go (typically /var/log/messages).

Answer 3

There's also a configurable log file. By default it can be found at /etc/named/data/named.run

You can change it's path and control the severity of the messages at /etc/named.conf at this part of the file:

logging{
  channel default_debug {
    file "data/named.run";
    severity dynamic;
   };
};

With the default settings, the content of the named.run file would be similar to what is printed at the /var/log/messages.

Answer 4

There is a number of DNS validation tools. NSLint is one such tool, which checks zone files on disk.

I've used DNS Sleuth in the past, which does DNS queries to check your setup. You can use the website or download a copy to use locally.

Answer 5

I'd look in the default system log. On my system it's /var/log/messages but I bet that's distribution-dependent.

Answer 6

There are two verification tools, one for the configuration file itself, and one for zone files. In Debian, they are called:

• named-checkconf
• named-checkzone