Error when trying to make secondary nameserver from copying primary nameserver

[Eivind Olsen]

Samad Agha wrote:

> 1- found out which version of bind dsn1 is running and installed exactly
> that version on dns2:
> [root at dns1 named]# named -v
> BIND 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-16.P1.el5

That version is quite old. In general, just because server 1 has an old
BIND isn't a reason to choose an old BIND on server 2 as well.

> 2- Copied dns1:/etc/named.conf from primary server (dns1) onto dns2 and
> chown it:
> [root at dns2 ~]# ls -l /etc/named.conf
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root named 2876 May  3 09:30 /etc/named.conf

Sure, you can use an existing named.conf as basis for your 2nd nameserver,
but if you want to turn you setup into a normal master/slave setup, you'll
also want to configure one of them with zones of type slave, and telling
BIND who the master is, something like:

zone "my.zonename" {
    type slave;
    file "path/to/my.zonename-file";
    masters {
        192.168.1.10;         // use proper IP address instead
    };
};

You might also want to set up your zonefile transfers, typically by
allowing the slave to transfer from the master (so you might need to
change the configuration on the master), and perhaps disallowing anyone
else from doing transfers.

> 4- I get the "couldn't open pid file '/var/run/named/named.pid':
> Permission
> denied" as follows:

Check the permissions of that directory, and see if there's also a
named.pid file already. I'm not familiar with that old RedHat package, so
I on't know how it expects things to be set up, if you're using the
bundled start script.
If the permissions initially look good, I suggest you look into whether
you have SELinux running, maybe its policies are making problems for you?

Regards
Eivind Olsen
eivind at aminor.no