Hi,

I am administering an offsite redhat box (which I don't have physical access to; nor the root password; just secure keys on my end that let me login with root access) which runs a 2.4 kernel. It hosts many websites, but unfortunately none of the websites are running. Well they are running, but can only be found by IP address, not by name. I did a

ps auxww | grep named | grep -v grep

to see if named is running, and it wasn't. I try to do

service named restart

and I get the error: /etc/init.d/named: named.restart: command not found

I tried to do service named stop and i get
doneting down named: [FAILED]

service named start gives me:
Starting named: execvp: Permission denied
[FAILED]

And finally service named status gives me
named dead but subsys locked

I went to /var/lock/subsys and did rm named, but it didn't fix anything. I'm not quite sure how to fix this (keeping in mind I don't have physical access)? I hope someone else does? Any help is appreciated.

Why would you need physical access if you can log in as root and do remote administration?

All you need to make sure is

* the installed "bind" package ("named" is part of it) is a compatible one, query it with "rpm --query bind", verify it with "rpm -V bind"

* the named service is configured correctly, i.e. /etc/named.conf and any zone files referenced within it

Then your should be able to start it. Take a look at the log files in /var/log for any error messages named stores there.

This looks wrong. Type mistake?

Maybe an updated bind package fixes this corrupted status message. It's a mixture between "done" and "shutting down named". Don't worry about it. The important bit is "FAILED". Not all service scripts can be smart enough to bail out if you try to stop a service which is stopped already because it failed and terminated unexpectedly.

Check the log file to see what's causing the problem


Normally in /var/log/messages