Why does Virtualmin required DNS servers to be running?

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#1 Wed, 05/13/2015 - 06:47
nibb

Why does Virtualmin required DNS servers to be running?

I just noticed something very strange about basically all Virtualmin servers.

DNS commands like this

host hostname.com

Are partially failing with localhost connections rejected. This was rather strange because non virtualmin servers are doing DNS lookups just fine.

I digged more and found its related to rndc which basically said on a status that it was missing a key.

So I used the option in Virtualmin on BIND to generate this and now I get: rndc status
WARNING: key file (/etc/rndc.key) exists, but using default configuration file (/etc/rndc.conf) rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#953: connection refused

When I started BIND

service named restart

Then it works. But when BIND is off, rndc does not work. This is rather a very strange behavior because I don't want to be running a full blown BIND DNS servers on each installation.

It seems Virtualmin requires named to be running and in servers where this is off (because they are not a DNS servers) then lookups have errors.

I consider this a serious bug because if its not running as a service then some requests will fail with: ;; Connection to 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) for hostname.com failed: connection refused.

So why does Virtualmin require BIND to be on and running if you don't need it? I don't think every single installation is running a DNS server, that makes no sense in particular if that servers is not hosting DNS records.

Wed, 05/13/2015 - 18:36
andreychek

Howdy,

You don't need to run BIND if you don't wish to -- that only needs to be running if you want Virtualmin to manage your DNS records.

If you don't want Virtualmin managing your DNS records, you can go into System Settings -> Features and Plugins, and there you can disable the BIND DNS Domain feature.

Once you do that, you can also disable the BIND service.

-Eric

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