7.4. Changing System File Locations in BIND 8 and 9

BIND 8 and 9 allow you to change the name and location of the following system files: named.pid, named-xfer, named_dump.db, and named.stats. Most of you will not need to use this feature -- don't feel obligated to change the names or locations of these files just because you can.

If you do change the location of the files written by the name server (named.pid, named_dump.db, or named.stats), for security reasons, you should choose a directory that is not world-writable. While we don't know of any break-ins caused by writing these files, you should follow this guideline just to be safe.

named.pid's full path is usually /var/run/named.pid or /etc/named.pid. One reason you might change the default location of this file is if you find yourself running more than one name server on a single host. (Yikes! Why would someone do that?) Chapter 10, "Advanced Features", gives an example of running two name servers on one host. You can specify a different named.pid file in the configuration file for each server:

options { pid-file "server1.pid"; };

named-xfer's path is usually /usr/sbin/named-xfer or /etc/named-xfer. You'll remember that named-xfer is used by a slave name server for inbound zone transfers. One reason you might change the default location is to build and test a new version of BIND in a local directory -- your test version of named can be configured to use the local version of named-xfer :

options { named-xfer "/home/rudy/named/named-xfer"; };

Since BIND 9 doesn't use named-xfer, of course, there's not much call for this substatement with BIND 9.

The name server writes named_dump.db into its current directory (BIND 8 or 9) when you tell it to dump its database. Here's an example of how to change the location of the dump file:

options { dump-file "/home/rudy/named/named_dump.db"; };

The name server writes named.stats into its current directory (BIND 8 or 9.1.0 and later) when you tell it to dump statistics. Here's an example of how to change its location:

options { statistics-file "/home/rudy/named/named.stats"; };

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