I added 3 new subdomains to my home network for testing. I added the records to my chroot'ed named at /var/named/chroot/var/named/named.conf. I just did reverse pointers and I couldn't get it to work:

[root@adept var]# host 192.168.4.120
Host 120.4.168.192.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

I did this with a simple Perl script, so I debugged the heck out of it and checked for tabs galore. I finally added forward lookups, which worked:

[root@adept var]# host blast-4-120
blast-4-120.internal.excfb.com has address 192.168.4.120

Heck, I've been burnt by a bad link in /etc before, so I checked it:

[root@adept var]# ls -al /etc/named.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root named 21 2008-02-25 16:15 /etc/named.conf -> /var/named/named.conf
[root@adept var]# ls -la /var/named/named.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root named 38 2008-02-25 16:24 /var/named/named.conf -> /var/named/chroot/var/named/named.conf

I even diff'ed them to be really, really sure. I ran named manually with '-g', fixed the warnings I got and then found out it didn't handle the chroot nicely. I looked at the init file and gave up on understanding it.

I couldn't find a log file for it, so I sent a SIGHUP to look for a database dump. I added logging to the config file and never saw any output. I never found that database dump.

But I did find an option that said where it should be:

       dump-file "/var/named/data/cache_dump.db";

I then asked myself, is there another copy of the config file?

[root@adept var]# ps -ef | grep named
named     4047     1  0 00:30 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/named -u named -t /var/named/chroot
root      4207  2886  0 01:00 pts/3    00:00:00 grep named
[root@adept var]# cd /var
[root@adept var]# find . -name named.conf
./named/named.conf
./named/chroot/etc/named.conf
./named/chroot/var/named/named.conf
[root@adept var]# ls -la ./named/named.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root named 38 2008-02-25 16:24 ./named/named.conf -> /var/named/chroot/var/named/named.conf
[root@adept var]# ls -la ./named/chroot/etc/named.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root named 2741 2008-02-25 20:49 ./named/chroot/etc/named.conf

Why yes, yes there is and it doesn't have my new zones!

[root@adept etc]# pwd
/var/named/chroot/etc
[root@adept etc]# mv named.conf named.conf.fracked
[root@adept etc]# ln -s ../var/named/named.conf .
[root@adept etc]# ls -la ../var/named/named.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root named 4920 2009-08-27 00:13 ../var/named/named.conf
[root@adept etc]# service named restart
Stopping named:                                            [  OK  ]
Starting named:                                            [  OK  ]
[root@adept etc]#
[root@adept etc]# host 192.168.4.120
120.4.168.192.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer blast-4-120.internal.excfb.com.

Now what was I doing before I fell down this rat hole?