Debian Upgrade: Wheezy to Jessie and Bind9

Recently I updated some of my Debian servers to Jessie. There were no problems during and after the upgrade process and I rebooted my machines. After that I checked my processes and recognized that my dns server „Bind9“ wasn’t running anymore.

When I tried to manually start the service I got the error message that there were no permissions to create the log file and I started to think that the bind daemon hasn’t been started in a chroot environment.

I searched on many pages for a solution of this problem and finally found it here. Thanks for that helpful post. The solution is very easy.

If you started your bind9 daemon earlier with this parameter in your /etc/default/bind9:

OPTIONS="-u bind -t /var/lib/named"

Copy the default service file for bind9 to prevent that your changes on the original file are overriden on update:

cp -av /lib/systemd/system/bind9.service /etc/systemd/system/bind9.service

Now add the chroot paramter for systemd in this file:

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/named -f -u bind -t /var/lib/named

After that reload the systemd daemon:

systemctl daemon-reload