Mac OS X Server

When Zones Just Won't Die

At times, you may find that information gets stuck in Server Admin and can’t be removed. For example, you see a Zone in Server Admin, and it doesn’t have a Name Server record attached to it. You can’t delete it but every time you add a Name Server it just disappears. This is often caused when you remove or change something and it gets dumped from the zone files in /var/named but not from the BIND view. Running serveradmin will show the data but as it’s serialized it can’t be removed:

serveradmin settings dns

Without a Name Server record, the zone is unresponsive to queries. Removing the zone can delete the zone file from /var/named/zones but doesn’t delete it from Server Admin. To go ahead and get rid of the bad records, open the /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple file with your favorite text editor. Here, each zone in OS X Server has a corresponding block, such as:

*+zone "1.168.192.in-addr.arpa." {+*
*+type master;+*
*+file "db.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa.";+*
*+allow-transfer {none;};+*
*+allow-update {none;};+*
};

Locate the offending block for the jacked up and remove or comment it out. Don’t delet this block though:

+zone "." {+
+type hint;+
+file "named.ca";+
};

+zone "localhost" IN {+
+type master;+
+file "localhost.zone";+
+allow-update { none; };+
};

+zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" IN {+
+type master;+
+file "named.local";+
+allow-update { none; };+
};

That block should stay in place. The Server Admin generated blocks should be towards the top and the above block that shouldn’t be removed should be at the bottom.