Posts Tagged ‘writable’

“named: the working directory is not writable” message on FreeBSD

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Recently I’ve noticed in my FreeBSD router in /var/log/messages the following messages;

Nov 25 15:23:47 pcfreak named[11339]: starting BIND 9.4.3-P2 -t /var/named -u bind
Nov 25 15:23:47 pcfreak named[11339]: command channel listening on 127.0.0.1#953
Nov 25 15:23:47 pcfreak named[11339]: command channel listening on ::1#953
Nov 25 15:23:47 pcfreak named[11339]: the working directory is not writable

My first reaction was that the BIND server is not working so I checked to resolve a couple of the domains which I’ve addedto my slave named server.

It appears each of the domains were resolving perfectly fine. However when I tried to resolve from the Internet I found it quite strangebecause I couldn’t resolve.

After a quick look up on the Internet about the same Issue I came to the following thread in freebsd.forums.org where the same problem was explained and an explanation on how to fix the error is explained there.

Anyways it seems the named[11339]: the working directory is not writable is not a crucial message and it’s just a warning

Thus you can safely ignore the message and continue on. I guess my problems with domains resolving from the Internet are caused because my ISP is filtering some UDP ports or something so I’ll contact them right away and check if this is the problem.