Inert Ramblings

The most recent batch of RedHat Enterprise (RHEL) fixes rolled out this past week break DNS (bind) on servers running Plesk. My Plesk 7.5.4 installation was effected as well as many other Plesk 7.x and 8.x users. The problem appears to be with a conflict between RedHat’s bind-chroot RPM and Plesk’s chroot system.

When the latest RHEL RPMs were rolled out the /etc/named.conf symlink which should point at Plesk’s /var/named/run-root/etc/named.conf config file was changed to point at RedHat’s default /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf file. Post-install scripts then munged the location of the Plesk config files. This resulted in the following error when starting or restarting the nameserver:

none:0: open: /etc/named.conf: file not found

A thread was started in the Plesk forums reporting the problem and a Rackspace employee replied in an earlier thread with a fix.

Basically, rpm -e bind-chroot to remove the RedHat RPM that conflicts with Plesk and then re-symlink /etc/named.conf to point back at the proper /var/named/run-root/etc/named.conf config file. This drops Plesk’s config files back into place.