Fixing rndc error with bind9

While setting up DNS on Pericles I did run into one snag:

rndc: connect failed: connection refused

The first thing to know, is that in Ubuntu Server's default setup, the /var/log/syslog file contains errors relating to bind and rndc startup. I watched this file and found some syntax errors as I tried to resolve this problem, and I recomend you do the same. Here is my solution:

Careful, this will overwrite your rndc.conf (run this while in the /etc/bind folder):

rndc-confgen > rndc.conf

Open the new rndc.conf. First, take the hyphen out of all the rndc-key names. I don't know why. rndckey is what I ended up needing. I think maybe bind9 removed support for the hyphen in these names, but rndc-confgen didn't know it.

Now, copy the bottom section (the commented out part) out, we're going to paste it into the top of named.conf.local, and uncomment it. Save changes to rndc.conf, and after pasting the other section into named.conf.local change the part inside the allow { } to localhost; instead of 127.0.0.1, for similar reason as before it seems to want a name instead of a hardcoded IP in this version.

I killed the named process then tried starting it again, and once again. I found an error in my syntax by looking at /var/log/syslog, and after fixing this it worked without any error.