Problem with Reloading BIND

Connection refused

After upgrading from bind8 to bind9 on a Debian system (stable is fine and sufficient unfortunately) you may notice a strange error message when trying to reload the nameserver with either of the following methods:

   sh /etc/init.d/bind9 reload
   rndc reload

The result is

   rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#953: connection refused

Executive Summary: I have no idea what has caused this, but playing with the configuration helped.

On the internet, it has been suggested to purge the entire bind8 and bind9 system, i.e. its packages, and reinstall bind9 from scratch. Chances are good that it's working afterwards.

What has helped as well, is commenting out the following section in named.conf.options:

   // Only permit being used as a nameserver by the local system
   //
   allow-recursion {
           127.0.0.1;
   };

Kill the nameserver (stopping doesn't work either), start it again and everything is fine. Now activate the above again, restart the nameserver and everything is still fine.