Status of DNS Server (BIND) is shown as stopped in Plesk UI, though “named” service is running on the server

Symptoms

• DNS Server (BIND) service is shown as not running in Plesk > Tools & Settings > Services Management.

• A server with CentOS 7 processes DNS requests and 53 port is being listened by the named service:

  # netstat -nltp | grep ‘:53’
  tcp 0 0 203.0.113.2:53 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 41488/named

• Service named is up and running:

  # service named status
  Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status named.service
  ● named.service – Berkeley Internet Name Domain (DNS)
  Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/named.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Active: active (running) since Thu 2017-12-21 05:16:25 EST; 1 weeks 5 days ago

• Service named-chroot is in failed or stopped state:

  # service named-chroot status
  Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status named-chroot.service
  ● named-chroot.service – Berkeley Internet Name Domain (DNS)
  Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/named-chroot.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2017-12-28 19:18:25 EST; 5 days ago

Cause

The named-chroot service is not running.
In CentOS 7 the init system initialization was replaced with systemd. As BIND is managed by Plesk and does not interfere with the original named startup script, Plesk installs its own named-chroot script. As named-chroot is stopped, Plesk reports that DNS Server (BIND) service is not running.

Resolution

1. Connect to the server via SSH.

2. Disable and stop named service:

   # systemctl disable named.service
   # systemctl stop named.service

3. Start and enable named-chroot service:

   # systemctl enable named-chroot.service
   # systemctl start named-chroot.service

4. Verify that the service is active and reports no errors:

   # systemctl status named-chroot.service

5. Run the following command to recreate zone file which may be missing due to the disabled service:

   # plesk repair dns -y