Take the 2-minute tour ×

I just made some changes to a DNS zone in Webmin and clicked the "Apply Changes" button. I received the error message:


How can I troubleshoot / repair this? I copied parts of the BIND config from a failing server, so I suspect that's what causing it...

share|improve this question
For others getting this error, I could solve it with just touch /var/cache/bind/managed-keys.bind; chown bind:bind /var/cache/bind/managed-keys.bind. Got the solution from linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/… –  mivk Jun 6 '12 at 21:00

3 Answers 3

Ensure that file /etc/rndc.conf exists and have

key somekey {
         algorithm hmac-md5;
         secret "somesecret";

and also there is proper section in /etc/named.conf :

key "somename" {
     algorithm hmac-md5;
     secret "somesecret";

controls {
     inet * port someport allow {"somegroup";} keys {"somename";};

Do not forget to read named.conf(5) and rndc.conf(5)

If it will not help, do what is described in the error message: check named and rndc versions (should be the same)

share|improve this answer

Do you change the keys ? If you don't stop the service before doing it, the key recorded in server daemon is the old, and rndc always use the new. Then thes keys are differents, so rejected by bind. You must kill the daemon, and restart it. The key is re-read at the configuration reading and use.

share|improve this answer
up vote 2 down vote accepted

With a little help from @plluksie, I solved this on my own. Here's what I did:

  1. First I ran rndc-confgen -a to regenerate my rndc key and conf file.
  2. Next, I verified that the contents of /etc/rndc.key were the same as /var/named/chroot/etc/rndc.key. They were (/etc/rndc.key was a symlink to /var/named/chroot//etc/rndc.key on my system)
  3. Then I edited /etc/rndc.key and copied the new key. I pasted that key into /etc/rndc.conf and /var/named/chroot/etc/rndc.conf
  4. The i restarted BIND via /etc/init.d/named restart and tested using: rndc reload some.zome.

These steps solved the issue for me.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


