Hello, I recently installed the maradns package and I'm running into a problem here. maradns starts up without any noticable errors on stdout or syslog. The process is running and there is a listening udp-port on *:53.

Unfortunately I don't get any answers from the DNS. If I query for an A-RR from a remote host using "dig" I get the following:

So, since I get an answer (at least the SOA-RR) and no errors, I assume maradns is running properly but fails to accept the zone-files. Are there any additional debug-options available to see what actually happens during startup, like loading zones and stuff?

Another strange thing I noticed is with the askmara utility: If I use it on the server running maradns to query the local DNS I get:

This seems a little strange, since "dig" running on another host does not experience timeouts, see 1st quote above.
Regarding firewalls: Since this is a common cause for timeouts,I also investigated along this line: I do run portforwarding on udp+tcp:53 using /etc/firewall.user. But the prerouting/DNAT rule is bound to the external interface only, using "-i $WAN" so it shouldn't interfere in this case. Also, with dnsmasq I don't experience any problems, so I thinks it not a problem with iptables.

I'm running out of ideas here, any input or hint to further debugging is very much appreciated!

TIA, Marcus

Hello again,
I'm really stuck here. I tried playing with different settings but without success. Could somebody please point a lost soul to some documentation for maradns 1.0?

TIA, Marcus

What about Google?

Tried that. I even tried a search specifically for >maradns +1.0 0QuickStart< which was the only document mentioned in the maradns 1.0 FAQ which in turn was the only documentation regarding Version 1.0 I found on the maradns.org website...

EDIT: OK, I downloaded the source for 1.0.36 and got my documentation from there. But just to get this right: Even though this is an "official" and "not-unsupported" package, there is no straightforward way to get the documentation from the web? If this is the case, you can refer future lost souls here. Or would it be better to put this in the wiki (e.g. in the docs under Config/Software/Application) or is this not necessary, because the forum is searchable? Please note that it isn't a problem finding maradns documentation, it's just that maradns was updated to v1.2 end of last year and now uses a completely different (as in file formats and tool names) interface from 1.0.
Regarding maradns 1.2: Is there already a port to openwrt available or is somebody working on it? If not I'd consider it a good project for my first development steps on openwrt, but I'd hate to reinvent the wheel...

EDIT2: If you experience the same effects (e.g. maradns starts but fails to accept your authoritative zones), you are probably missing this section in mararc:

# We must initialize the csv1 hash, or MaraDNS will be unable to
# load any zone files
csv1 = {}

Also, the current sample config has the "run_as_root" parameter enabled. Since I'm not sure about the security implications of this, I preferred to use "maradns_uid=65534" but ymmv....

Regards, Marcus

(Last edited by holyLAN on 23 Feb 2006, 19:47)