17.4. Using rndc

17.4. Using rndc

BIND includes a utility called rndc which allows command line administration of the named daemon from the localhost or a remote host.

In order to prevent unauthorized access to the named daemon, BIND uses a shared secret key authentication method to grant privileges to hosts. This means an identical key must be present in both /etc/named.conf and the rndc configuration file, /etc/rndc.conf.

Note

If you have installed the bind-chroot package, the BIND service will run in the /var/named/chroot environment. All configuration files will be moved there. As such, the rndc.conf file is located in /var/named/chroot/etc/rndc.conf.

Note that since the rndc utility does not run in a chroot environment, /etc/rndc.conf is a symlink to /var/named/chroot/etc/rndc.conf.