One of out new servers is going to be running on FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE. Plesk officially supports FreeBSD 5.3 but I wanted to try and go with the latest and greatest. Everything went off without a hitch except for the DNS configuration. To get DNS to work with a base install and Plesk you need to:

  • Update /etc/rc.conf to include: named_enable=”YES”
  • Edit /etc/rndc.conf and change all instances of rndc-key to rndckey then copy the “use the following in named.conf” section to the clip board:

    • #key “rndckey” {
    # algorithm hmac-md5;
    # secret “Ce0000000000000====”;
    #};
    # controls {
    # inet 127.0.0.1 port 953
    # allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { “rndckey”; };
    # };

  • Save the file.
  • Open /etc/named.conf and change all rdnc-key to rdnckey. Make sure that the section you copied from rdnc.conf is exactly the same in named.conf and save the file.
  • Create the file /etc/namedb/rcnd.key
  • Copy in the rcnd key section:

    • #key “rndckey” {
    # algorithm hmac-md5;
    # secret “Ce0000000000000====”;
    #};

  • Remove the # signs and save the file.

Now you can start named (/etc/rc.d/named.conf). Check /var/log/messages and make sure rcnd was initialized:

named[3171]: command channel listening on 127.0.0.1#953

You should be all set!