Friday 19 August 2011

DNS and DHCP

For some reason I hadn't enabled the ability for DHCPD to update my internal DNS server when a new client joined the network, so I decided to do that.

The process is quite simple, you generate a key which you give to both DHCP and DNS and they hash out the communication.

However after I did that I noticed I was getting an error:

Aug 19 17:00:56 server01 dhcpd: if iPod-touch.mydomain.org IN A rrset doesn't exist add iPod-touch.mydomain.org 3600 IN A 192.168.1.140: timed out.
Aug 19 17:00:56 server01 dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.140 from 00:26:bb:a1:cf:a0 (iPod-touch) via eth1
Aug 19 17:00:56 server01 dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.140 to 00:26:bb:a1:cf:a0 (iPod-touch) via eth1

I Googled for any signs of what this could mean and I didn't find anything. There weren't too many people reporting the same issue, so I guess there wasn't that much to it.

I finally did an strace on the named server and managed to catch that the server was getting an access denied error. I looked at my bind directory and realized it was owned by root as were the files... I quickly changed this to the bind user and voila! problem solved.

-P

PS - many people may wonder why I would want to do this in the first place, do I REALLY have that many machines or ... anyway, the answer is it's "because I can".