Unable to start BIND DNS server in Plesk for Debian/Ubuntu: named: extra command line arguments

Symptoms

• BIND DNS server fails to start on Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions. The following message appears in /var/log/syslog:

  CONFIG_TEXT: systemd[1]: Started BIND Domain Name Server.
  dns named[24438]: usage: named [-4|-6] [-c conffile] [-d debuglevel] [-E engine] [-f|-g]
  dns named[24438]: [-n number_of_cpus] [-p port] [-s] [-S sockets] [-t chrootdir]
  dns named[24438]: [-u username] [-U listeners] [-m {usage|trace|record|size|mctx}]
  dns named[24438]: usage: named [-v|-V]
  dns named[24438]: named: extra command line arguments
  dns systemd[1]: bind9.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE

• Restarting DNS Server (BIND) in Plesk at Tools & Settings > Services Management shows no errors.

• In some cases, BIND DNS server may be active, but domains are not resolvable from the Internet:

  # dig +short example.com @dns.google   
  103.27.200.73

  and locally from the server:

  # dig +short example.com @localhost

Cause

The /etc/default/bind9 file has been altered: the content of the file/etc/default/bind9 differs from the output below:

# cat /etc/default/bind9
OPTIONS=" -t /var/named/run-root -c /etc/named.conf -u bind -n 2"

Resolution

1. Connect to your Plesk server via SSH.

2. Open the /etc/default/bind9 file in a text editor. In this example, we are using vi editor:

   # vi /etc/default/bind9

3. Change the OPTIONS directive to:

   CONFIG_TEXT: OPTIONS=" -t /var/named/run-root  -c /etc/named.conf -u bind -n 2"

4. Save the changes and close the file.

5. Restart BIND DNS server:

   # service bind9 restart