Issue DNS Server not starting.

[Jeff Edwards]

I've been trying over the last few days to get my DNS working in Plesk 12.5. Everything seems to be set up correctly and the nameservers are registered at Namecheap and pointing to my nameservers listed in the records in my domain (NS and A records), but the domain is not resolving and when I nslookup the nameserver ns1 or ns2 by domain name it cannot be found.

I checked to make sure that Bind was installed in plesk and it is. One thing that strikes me as odd is that under:

Tools and settings - Services Management.

The DNS Server (BIND) is there but appears not started. I click the start button and get the message "Please allow for some time for the service to start". Some time later (I gave it a day just to be sure) I went back and checked the status in 'Services Management' and the start icon was still highlighted. I tried several times but nothing seems to happen. I get the happy green message but it does nothing.

Is this why the nameservers are not reachable and if it is, does anyone know how to fix it?

Kind Regards.

 

[IgorG]

Have you tried to start BIND in command line and check the logs? Any error messages there?

 

[Jeff Edwards]

Thanks for responding IgorG

Yes I have. I tried starting, restarting bind and names in a Putty session. I examined the syslog and there was no trace of bind. Apparently for my setup the info should be in syslog. I have:

Ubuntu 14.04
Plesk 12.5 (Web Pro)

When attempting to restart bind (bind9) I expected some sort of response from Linux but it just went back to the prompt. No messages at all. I'm not sure if this is normal.

It was a clean install on a new VPS setup. The only additional things I've done (which I can't see conflicting in any way) are to install Memcached and php-mamcached to use in PHP7 and also the Pear mail and associated elements. In Plesk I added references in PHP to get them up and running. Apart from all that there's no tinkering that's been done.

I did activate the Firewall in Plesk. For testing purposes I added a rule for UDP and TCP on port 53 but there was already a rule for DNS server. It didn't make any difference.

At the moment I'm having to use Namecheap's free DNS nameservers to get sites up and running. It's not exactly what I wanted (my own nameservers) but it will have to do until this puzzling issue is resolved.

 

[Lloyd_mcse]

Hi Jeff,
have a look at a post I wrote a while back...

https://www.lloyd-day.me/bind-fails-to-start/

I hope it helps
Regards

Lloyd

 

[Jeff Edwards]

Thanks Lloyd_mcse.

That's one I haven't come across yet. I followed the instructions but came to a halt when trying to restart the service.

"service apparmor restart"

I got the message:

"apparmor: unrecognized service".

I checked to see if it was running by typing this at the command line:

"apparmor_status"

but got

"apparmor_status: command not found"

It does seem to be on the server because the folders are there. I'm not sure if it is supposed to be listed in the plesk components of the plesk panel. It isn't listed.

 

[Lloyd_mcse]

Oh ok, that's usually a good bet on a new system
The general advice from Plesk is to remove AppArmor...

https://kb.plesk.com/en/120026

But as you see from my blog post, it's pretty trivial to get it working.

Back to your issue...I'd check and make sure you don't have a stuck process, if you do kill it...

# lsof -i | grep bind
named  1070  bind  20u  IPv4  9975  0t0  TCP localhost:domain (LISTEN)
named  1070  bind  22u  IPv4  9978  0t0  TCP localhost:953 (LISTEN)
# kill 1070

And then try and start bind again....

# service bind9 start

Regards

Lloyd

 

[Jeff Edwards]

I issued the command

lsof -i | grep bind

and nothing displayed. It just went back to the command prompt.

I issued the command

service bind9 start

and nothing displayed. It just went back to the command prompt.

I also tried

service bind9 status

and got the same.

Shouldn't it be showing some kind of information?

This is not the only thing I've been having a headache with. It took me a few days to get Memcached running for PHP7 and I still haven't resolved imagick for PHP7 after following numerous methods and tutorials. The DNS thing is strange though because upon initial install and adding the main domain through the wizard, the zones were set up correctly by Plesk. A and NS records. It's been like a never ending daisy chain. I wouldn't mind if I was presented with some kind of error to guide the way but even that luxury is not afforded me. I'll stop whingeing now

 

[Jeff Edwards]

Sorry I missed the items in your blog post. Here are my results. After issuing the command to see if apparmor is installed:

# dpkg --status apparmor | grep -i status

I got this:

# dpkg-query: package 'apparmor' is not installed and no information is available
# Use dpkg --info (= dpkg-deb --info) to examine archive files,
# and dpkg --contents (= dpkg-deb --contents) to list their contents.

So I issued all the commands above and they all failed with :

# dpkg-deb: error: --info needs a .deb filename argument
#
# Type dpkg-deb --help for help about manipulating *.deb files;
# Type dpkg --help for help about installing and deinstalling packages.

and

# dpkg-deb: error: --contents takes exactly one argument
#
# Type dpkg-deb --help for help about manipulating *.deb files;
# Type dpkg --help for help about installing and deinstalling packages.