My named doesn't bind to my private IP and only binds to localhost.

I already have the listen-on option in /var/named/etc/named.conf file pointed to my private IP.

If I do a "named -c /var/named/etc/named.conf" it gives error -

none:0: open: /var/named/etc/named.conf: file not found
loading configuration: file not found

All my files under /var/named are root:named.

My "/var/named/etc/named.conf" symlinks to /etc/named.conf. And if I start bind with "named" it starts on 127.0.0.1 by reading /etc/named.conf by default.

Even more odd is, if I do "named -c /etc/named.conf -g" it actually listens on my private IP along with localhost.

192.168.25.5.domain *.*

just sounds like a broekn symlink. show us the output of "ls -l /var/named/etc/named.conf"

# ls -l /var/named/etc/named.conf
-rw-r----- 1 root named 1740 Feb 14 15:49 /var/named/etc/named.conf

# ls -l /etc/named.conf
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 25 Feb 14 15:50 /etc/named.conf -> /var/named/etc/named.conf

does the named daemon user have access to that directory as a whole? looks like a permissions issue then really. you might want to try slackening the permissions temporarily, make it all globally readable, including directories, to see if that makes it work.

You can't give it the path to /var/named... because that will be the root once named is chrooted, so there is no /var/named/var/named/etc...

You must have modified something from the default installation of named on OpenBSD because it "just works" if you start it the way OpenBSD has provided (put named_flags="" in /etc/rc.conf.local, and if you have to restart it simply do /usr/sbin/named as root). I'm running 3 DNS servers on OpenBSD and none of them have a file or a symlink /etc/named.conf. What lead you to believe that it was necessary?

Edit: If you're using third-party documentation to setup services on OpenBSD, don't. OpenBSD has a FAQ on their website that explains how to do most common things, and if you look in /etc/rc.conf it shows a list of all the services that are built in by default. If something is configured to not run by default in /etc/rc.conf, you simply copy that configuration switch to /etc/rc.conf.local and turn it on. It will start automatically when the system boots.

You need to use the documentation from OpenBSD (such as the FAQ and their man pages) because a lot of the typical UNIX an GNU software that runs in OpenBSD has been modified for better security. The way you do something on OpenBSD is not necessarily the way you would do it on Linux or any other OS.