I recently moved a bind installation from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6. As part of the move I built out a new server with CentOS 6, staged the bind chroot packages and then proceeded to copy all of the zone files from the CentOS 5 server to the CentOS 6 server. Once all the pieces were in place I attempted to start up bind. This failed, and I was greeted with the following error:
$ service named start
Starting named:
Error in named configuration: [FAILED]
There wasn’t anything in /var/log/messages to specifically state what the problem was, though when I reviewed the bind log file I noticed there were several “not loaded due to errors” messages in it:
$ grep "not loaded due to errors" named.log
07-Jan-2012 21:00:03.505 general: error: zone prefetch.net/IN: NS 'ns1.prod.prefetch.net' has no address records (A or AAAA)
07-Jan-2012 21:00:03.505 general: error: zone prefetch/IN: NS 'ns2.prod.prefetch.net' has no address records (A or AAAA)
07-Jan-2012 21:00:03.505 general: error: zone prefetch/IN: not loaded due to errors.
After reviewing the errors I noticed that the problematic zone files (I was not the original author of these) were configured to use forward references to entries in subzone files. This is a no no, and it looks like CentOS 5 bind allows you to use forward references and CentOS 6 bind does not. To allow me to bring up the server while I tracked down all of the offending zone files I set DISABLE_ZONE_CHECKING to yes in /etc/sysconfig/named:
$ grep DISABLE /etc/sysconfig/named
DISABLE_ZONE_CHECKING="yes"
This allowed me to test the server to make sure it worked, and I will get the zone files corrected and run through a zone file consistency check utility in the coming days. If you are moving from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 you might want to watch out for this (ideally you would already have properly structured zone files!).