Updating your bind/named hints file

You need to at least check for updates to your hints file regularly if you run a name server as otherwise you could have trouble looking up random domain names when the root servers change.

First open your "/etc/named.conf" config file and find where your hints file is located.

Here are some parts of the named.conf detailing where the hints file is:

options {
        directory "/var/named";

zone "." IN {
        type hint;
        file "caching-example/named.ca";

So our example has the hints file at:


Now Change to the above directory and move this file out of the way:

mv named.ca named.ca_old

Then download the following file from the Internic ftp site using wget:

wget ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/named.root

Rename the downloaded file to match the name in your config file:

mv named.root named.ca

Now restart named make the changes take effect:

/etc/rc.d/rc.bind stop
/etc/rc.d/rc.bind start

Last updated: 18/08/2005