Layered Technologies Helpdesk :: Support Port...

BIND: couldn‘t open pid file ‘/var/run/named.pid‘: File exists

Article ID:

000050

Rating:

5.0 / 5.0 (4 votes)

Views:

554

Problem:

On a FreeBSD host BIND will not start after making changes or an upgrade. When restarting BIND and running ‘tail -f /var/log/messages‘ you see the following error ‘couldn‘t open pid file ‘/var/run/named.pid‘: File exists‘

---

Solution:

named needs a place to put its ‘pid‘ file. And since its running as a un-privileged user ‘bind‘ it needs a place its pid file. That place must be owned by the bind user and bind must be able to write its pid file there.

# Create the directory.
mkdir /var/run/named

# Change the perms
chown -R bind:bind /var/run/named

Edit the named.conf file to tell named to use that file. Add the following entry to your named.conf file after the ‘controls‘ statement and before any of the ‘zone‘ statements.

## Start

options {
pid-file "/var/run/named/named.pid";

};

## End

Make sure you do not have any extra }; in the file and then save the file and restart named.

named -u bind -c /etc/namedb/named.conf

Then check /var/log/messages and see if there was any errors.

# Sucessful startup.
tail /var/log/messages
Feb 6 11:34:51 ran named[1298]: starting BIND 9.3.0 -u bind -c /etc/namedb/named.conf
Feb 6 11:34:51 ran named[1298]: command channel listening on 127.0.0.1#953

BIND should now start with no errors and place its pid file in /var/run/named/named.pid