Yesterday, I noticed an error in a bind zone file, and after correcting it, I tried to restart bind9, but the service refused to stop, displaying this error:
rndc: connect failed: 127.0.0.1#953: connection refused
I found a lot of references to this error message, with no obvious fixes, but there were a lot of references to rndc.key and rndc-confgen. I noticed that the date on the existing rndc.key was exactly one year from the day before I had this problem. I knew I hadn't restarted bind in the meantime, so I thought that the key had expired. I generated a new key with rndc-confgen -a. I had to force a restart, as I couldn't stop the bind service; since then, bind has been working fine
The obvious conclusion is that rndc.key expires after a year. I have not found this mentioned in the man pages or documentation for bind9 that I've checked, and I would think it was an important point if true. Can anyone confirm if this is the standard, or if there's some way to configure the expiration date?
