CentOS - Jan 2010 - Bind data directory borked on update from 5.3 to 5.4

I updated my secondary DNS server from 5.3 to 5.4 today.  After the
update, named would not start.  A bit of investigation found that all of
the files in /var/named/chroot/var/named/data had been turned into links
to themselves!

Fortunately, since this is a secondary DNS, all I had to do was delete
the files, replace the root hints file and let everything else copy back
over from the master.  If this had been the master, I would have had to
restore from backups.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

-- 
Bowie

Bowie Bailey wrote on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:51:40 -0500:
> Has anyone else seen this problem?
No. I usually see some change in the permissions 
(/var/named/chroot/var/named/ loses group write and named logs some 
complaints but still works) when updating named. I think I've seen this 
happen several times and with the last update as well. I've not taken this 
serious as it didn't stop named from working. I assume the write 
permissions are only necessary for client DNS updates which I do not use.
I remember there was a more serious problem a year or so ago, when an 
update stopped named from working because it overwrote some files.
So, the upgrading experience has been less smooth with named than with 
other packages, but I haven't seen what you experienced.

Kai

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On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at buc.com>
wrote:
> I updated my secondary DNS server from 5.3 to 5.4 today. ?After the
> update, named would not start. ?A bit of investigation found that all of
> the files in /var/named/chroot/var/named/data had been turned into links
> to themselves!
>
> Fortunately, since this is a secondary DNS, all I had to do was delete
> the files, replace the root hints file and let everything else copy back
> over from the master. ?If this had been the master, I would have had to
> restore from backups.
>
> Has anyone else seen this problem?
>
> --
> Bowie

Do you have the caching-nameserver package installed?  I've heard this
can cause problems with files getting overwritten.

Kai Schaetzl wrote on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:31:33 +0100:
> No. I usually see some change in the permissions 
> (/var/named/chroot/var/named/ loses group write and named logs some 
> complaints but still works) when updating named.
And sure enought that happened with latest bind update today again.

/var/named/chroot/var l
drwxrwx--- 2 named named 4096 Jan 20 17:33 log
drwxr-x--- 4 root  named 4096 Jan 20 17:33 named
drwxr-x--- 4 root  named 4096 Mar 14  2003 run
drwxrwx--- 2 named named 4096 Mar 14  2003 tmp

I usually set g+w for the named directory. I wonder now if the owner of 
that directory should actually be named? Thanks.

Kai

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