Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade

[md0]

@freebsd-man Thank you for your suggestion - I've already tried the exact same steps you mentioned, minus the config file pruning, as I don't want to reacreate all my zones again from scratch. Needless to say, nothing came out of it :(

I've now migrated my Bind zones to a debian server behind the firewall - I like the idea of a GUI for zone editing but as it is working right now it's not worth the trouble...

[smartis]

Same issue here on several APU2s, as so many seem to have. Upgrade/Clean install - all the same.

What works for me is executing

/usr/local/sbin/named -4 -c /etc/namedb/named.conf -u bind -t /cf/named/

in a shell after install & boot. Annoying as hell.

I've been happy with pfsense in the past but the upgrade to 2.5 has not been a positive user experience

[md0]

@smartis For me starting the service manually via the GUI or executing

named.sh start

also seemed to work.

[Cussy]

Has anybody found a solution to this?

[matthijs]

@cussy

Yes, migrate to OPNSense

[Gertjan]

@smartis said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

in a shell after install & boot. Annoying as hell.

Install the Shellcmd pfSense package and enter that command, select it to get executed after boot.

[jacotec]

@smartis said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

/usr/local/sbin/named -4 -c /etc/namedb/named.conf -u bind -t /cf/named/

I've waited with the upgrade until 2.5.1 and today some users are complaining that some of my sites were not loading for some, not all of them.

Found my bind (master zone) did not work, restart via GUI was not working. When killing via SSH and restarting the log showed an exit with "general: info: received control channel command 'sync -clean'"

After one hour of searching and shouting I found this thread and the command above solved it. What lacks is my understanding why.

What is this "magic command" doing?
Do I need to apply it after every restart of bind?
Is there any config thing which causes the main issue (and that this command is needed) - or how can I solve this permanently. I don't want to nervously check if my bind is still running every day ... never had any issues in the last years with any version before 2.5.x

[Gertjan]

@jacotec said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

What is this "magic command" doing?

This one :

/usr/local/sbin/named -4 -c /etc/namedb/named.conf -u bind -t /cf/named/

The command : /usr/local/sbin/named - you should know that the executables of the package known under the name 'bind' are called 'named', which comes probably from 'name daemon'.

The option -4 indicates : use IPv4 only.

"-c /usr/local/sbin/named" specifies the config file.

"-u bind" specifies the user identity under which named runs.

"-t /cf/named/" a temporary work directory - probably where all the zone info is stored.

@jacotec said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

Do I need to apply it after every restart of bind?

That's why I proposed :

@gertjan said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

Install the Shellcmd pfSense package and enter that command, select it to get executed after boot.

@jacotec said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

Is there any config thing which causes the main issue (and that this command is needed) - or how can I solve this permanently. I don't want to nervously check if my bind is still running every day ... never had any issues in the last years with any version before 2.5.x

Yes.
For pfSense, processes that should start up at system boot should be listed here :
/usr/local/etc/rc.d
There should be an executable (script) file named or named.sh
It should contain the correct instructions/commands.
When bind (named) starts, it should leave log messages. Not much when everything is ok, more if there are errors - if it shuts down, it should log the reason.

If it doesn't 'log' messages, crack up the verbosity.

[jacotec]

@gertjan
I need to come back to this. Without restarting my pfsense users again had issues and again I found that my pfsense was again not answering any DNS requests.

Giving the above start command in shell resolved the issue.

Strangely pfSense showed the service running in the GUI and also the Service Watchdog did not detect that bind was not running.

I really need to fix the root cause of this happening.

The "named.sh" script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d uses the exactly same start command you've posted, the stop command is completely different:

#!/bin/sh
# This file was automatically generated
# by the pfSense service handler.

rc_start() {
			if [ -z "`/bin/ps auxw | /usr/bin/grep "[n]amed " | /usr/bin/awk '{print $2}'`" ]; then
			/usr/local/sbin/named -4 -c /etc/namedb/named.conf -u bind -t /cf/named/
		fi
}

rc_stop() {
			/usr/local/sbin/rndc -q -c "/usr/local/etc/rndc.conf" sync -clean 2>/dev/null
		/usr/local/sbin/rndc -q -c "/usr/local/etc/rndc.conf" stop -clean 2>/dev/null
		sleep 5
		/usr/bin/killall -TERM named 2>/dev/null
		sleep 2
}

case $1 in
	start)
		rc_start
		;;
	stop)
		rc_stop
		;;
	restart)
		rc_stop
		rc_start
		;;
esac

I'm fully puzzled, but this issue is mission critical. Do you have any idea what's going wrong here?

When I hit "Restart" for named in "Status" --> "Services" bind (named) is stopped according to the log, but never started again:

Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	general: notice: exiting
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	general: notice: stopping command channel on 127.0.0.1#8953
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	general: info: shutting down: flushing changes
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	network: info: no longer listening on 80.152.208.158#53
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	network: info: no longer listening on 10.0.0.5#53
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	general: info: received control channel command 'stop -clean'
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	general: info: dumping all zones, removing journal files: success
Apr 27 10:51:41	named	20303	general: info: received control channel command 'sync -clean'

"Status" --> "Services" still shows it running and not stopped.

Exectuting "named.sh" shows no error messages, but bind still does not start properly:

[2.5.1-RELEASE][root@router.mydomain.de]/usr/local/etc/rc.d: ./named.sh

I don't fully understand the condition in the start script could prevent named from being started:

if [ -z "`/bin/ps auxw | /usr/bin/grep "[n]amed " | /usr/bin/awk '{print $2}'`" ]; then

Update:
With "ps auxw | grep named" I found a second, older "named" thread running which did not react to a normal "kill" command. I've killed it with "kill -9", now the GUI showed named correctly stopped. I've started bind via the GUI and for now it's running.
I'll watch if it keeps working ...

[Gertjan]

@jacotec said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

Exectuting "named.sh" shows no error messages, but bind still does not start properly:
[2.5.1-RELEASE][root@router.mydomain.de]/usr/local/etc/rc.d: ./named.sh

The scripts tells you that :

@jacotec said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

case $1 in

This $1 is the first paramter on the command line.
I propose you use stop or start or restart like :

/usr/local/etc/rc.d: ./named.sh restart

[jacotec]

Just as a followup:

As I've read somewhere in forums that bind 9.16.12 is supposed to have a memory leak (which might have caused my crashes) I've manually updated bind to the current 9.16.15 where this was fixed:

pkg add -f https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/latest/All/bind916-9.16.15.txz

I've never had issues since this update.

9.16.15 is not available via package manager yet (no idea how long this takes before the package is updated in the pfsense package manager).

[de0xyrib0se]

@freebsd-man said in Bind upgrade producing errors on pfsense 2.5 upgrade:

After deleting the manual installed bind and lmdb packages und the old pfSense -pkg-bind package via shell, I installed the updated Package pfSense-pkg-bind-9.16_10 via GUI.

While installing I used "tail -f /var/log/resolver.log" to inspect the startup of the new bind.

I got rndc timeout messages from install log in GUI and errors from bind-startup in tail-output.
After GUI timouts the install finished successful.

After deleting corrupted journal files with "rm /cf/named/etc/namedb/*jnl" I finally was able to start bind via GUI.
Now it is up and running.

Just upgraded to 2.5.2. Nothing I did (restore config, reinstall package) would start bind, it simply was hung in lala-land. Deleting the journal files got it back to life immediately.

[matthijs]

Hi, This bind issue is still not fixed
When I reinstall the bind package it takes very a long time (5 minutes or so) while I see the following in the installation log multiple times :

xecuting custom_php_resync_config_command()...rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#8953: timed out
rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#8953: timed out
rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#8953: timed out
rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#8953: timed out
rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#8953: timed out

Maybe the issue can be reproduced by using a not default rndc port (8953 in my case)
The same happens when I reboot PFSense, it takes a long time before bind service is started because of the same thing (rndc not available on 127.0.0.1:8953) After 5 minutes or so bind finally starts and everything is working fine.

[de0xyrib0se]

@matthijs did "rm /cf/named/etc/namedb/*jnl" work for you?

[matthijs]

@de0xyrib0se
No that did not work for me.

I do not have problems with the working of BIND, I can start/stop BIND and BIND is running fine. The problem I still experience is a very slow start after reboot (5 minutes) and a very slow package reinstall (also 5 minutes) This is because of the "rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#8953: timed out" X 5 times. After the fifth timeout BIND starts (after 5 minutes or so) succesfully. This is an issue for me because packages like PFBlockerNG services, VMWare Guest services start only after BIND succesfully started. So it takes a long time for all the services being up & running after a restart/reboot

[aligator638]

@matthijs I have the same issue since I am also running the resolver, even worse I have many zones in bind and it takes up to 40mn to have all my services up.

[matthijs]

Hi NetGate, is this going to be fixed anytime in the near future ?
We have this issue since the 2.5.0 release

[Gertjan]

@matthijs

I presume 'bind' is a package with a non-Netgate-member maintainer. Like pfBlockerNG Suricata, postfix etc etc.
As such, it's done by people like 'you' and 'me' : pfSense users.

I couldn't find who is maintaining it right now (but didn't really looked more then 30 seconds neither ;) )

Find him send send him a PM ?

edit : check also the redmine tickets : there are 10 tickets open for BIND.

[matthijs]

@gertjan Ok thanks for the info, I did not know that :-)

[de0xyrib0se]

@matthijs was bind turned off when you tried to remove the journal files?