# 9. Troubleshooting

## 9.1. Common Problems

### 9.1.1. It’s Not Working; How Can I Figure Out What’s Wrong?

The best solution to installation and configuration issues is to take preventive measures by setting up logging files beforehand. The log files provide hints and information that can be used to identify anything that went wrong and fix the problem.

### 9.1.2. EDNS Compliance Issues

EDNS (Extended DNS) is a standard that was first specified in 1999. It is required for DNSSEC validation, DNS COOKIE options, and other features. There are broken and outdated DNS servers and firewalls still in use which misbehave when queried with EDNS; for example, they may drop EDNS queries rather than replying with FORMERR. BIND and other recursive name servers have traditionally employed workarounds in this situation, retrying queries in different ways and eventually falling back to plain DNS queries without EDNS.

Such workarounds cause unnecessary resolution delays, increase code complexity, and prevent deployment of new DNS features. In February 2019, all major DNS software vendors removed these workarounds; see https://www.dnsflagday.net/2019/ for further details. This change was implemented in BIND as of release 9.14.0.

As a result, some domains may be non-resolvable without manual intervention. In these cases, resolution can be restored by adding `server` clauses for the offending servers, or by specifying `edns no` or `send-cookie no`, depending on the specific noncompliance.

To determine which `server` clause to use, run the following commands to send queries to the authoritative servers for the broken domain:

    dig soa <zone> @<server> +dnssec
    dig soa <zone> @<server> +dnssec +nocookie
    dig soa <zone> @<server> +noedns

If the first command fails but the second succeeds, the server most likely needs `send-cookie no`. If the first two fail but the third succeeds, then the server needs EDNS to be fully disabled with `edns no`.

Please contact the administrators of noncompliant domains and encourage them to upgrade their broken DNS servers.

### 9.1.3. Inspecting Encrypted DNS Traffic

Note

This feature requires support from the cryptographic library that BIND 9 is built against. For OpenSSL, version 1.1.1 or newer is required (use `named -V` to check).

By definition, TLS-encrypted traffic (e.g. DNS over TLS, DNS over HTTPS) is opaque to packet sniffers, which makes debugging problems with encrypted DNS close to impossible. However, Wireshark offers a solution to this problem by being able to read key log files. In order to make `named` prepare such a file, set the `SSLKEYLOGFILE` environment variable to either:

- the string `config` (`SSLKEYLOGFILE=config`); this requires defining a `logging` `channel` which will handle messages belonging to the `sslkeylog` category,

- the path to the key file to write (`SSLKEYLOGFILE=/path/to/file`); this is equivalent to the following `logging` configuration:

      channel default_sslkeylogfile {
          file "${SSLKEYLOGFILE}" versions 10 size 100m suffix timestamp;
      };

      category sslkeylog {
          default_sslkeylogfile;
      };

Note

When using `SSLKEYLOGFILE=config`, augmenting the log channel output using options like `print-time` or `print-severity` is strongly discouraged as it will likely make the key log file unusable.

When the `SSLKEYLOGFILE` environment variable is set, each TLS connection established by `named` (both incoming and outgoing) causes about 1 kilobyte of data to be written to the key log file.

Warning

Due to the limitations of the current logging code in BIND 9, enabling TLS pre-master secret logging adversely affects `named` performance.

## 9.2. Incrementing and Changing the Serial Number

Zone serial numbers are just numbers — they are not date-related. However, many people set them to a number that represents a date, usually of the form YYYYMMDDRR. Occasionally they make a mistake and set the serial number to a date in the future, then try to correct it by setting it to the current date. This causes problems because serial numbers are used to indicate that a zone has been updated. If the serial number on the secondary server is lower than the serial number on the primary, the secondary server attempts to update its copy of the zone.

Setting the serial number to a lower number on the primary server than the one on the secondary server means that the secondary will not perform updates to its copy of the zone.

The solution to this is to add 2147483647 (2^31-1) to the number, reload the zone and make sure all secondaries have updated to the new zone serial number, then reset it to the desired number and reload the zone again.

## 9.3. Where Can I Get Help?

The BIND-users mailing list, at https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users, is an excellent resource for peer user support. In addition, ISC maintains a Knowledgebase of helpful articles at https://kb.isc.org.

Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) offers annual support agreements for BIND 9, ISC DHCP, and Kea DHCP. All paid support contracts include advance security notifications; some levels include service level agreements (SLAs), premium software features, and increased priority on bug fixes and feature requests.

Please contact info@isc.org or visit https://www.isc.org/contact/ for more information.