Tiny DNS

A couple of weeks ago I installed DJB DNS on my local machine purely as a chaching name server. Then last week we ordered a new server for Rad Inks and I wanted to try out tiny DNS on it just for one.

The experiment didn't go too well. After having compiled and installed the software as per the installation guide I found that it would not start up properly under daemontools, or it would start up (at least a tinydns process) would appear in the process list but it does not appear to be listening on port 53. (In case you are wondering, there's nothing else (eg bind) listening on this port).

readproctitle, which indicates error messages for daemons running under daemontools, has this to say:

readproctitle service errors: ...t exist?supervise: warning: unable to open tinydns/supervise/sta

(the last bit is obviously truncated - it should read status)

Unfortunately there wasn't anything on this error message in google, so I went back and did a lttle bit of tinkering without much luck. I Then googled again for tinydns startup failures and came up with a book on DJB DNS at inter 7 (these are the guys who did sqwebmail), that wasn't much use either, it looks like a rehash of the good professor's documentation with lot's of part's missing.

Then I thought I struck gold. A site by Rusell Nelson called http://www.tinydns.org/. (If you are playing around with Prof DJB's stuff and don't know who Russ is, that means you haven't RTFMed or STFAed well enough). Unforunately though this site has many useful resoruces it didn't include a solution to my specific problem.

It was then that I decided to restart the machine in sheer frustration (by now I had stopped and started the service countless times). Now all the readproctitle errors have disappeared, netstat -an shows a process listening in on port 53, ps shows a tinydns process but there is still a but, it's refusing to accept connections on port 53 :-(