After trying to set up BIND9 on Ubuntu, I spent several hours scratching my head as to why I could not resolve the names of some hosts on a local zone I configured. I followed this KB to the letter yet still no dice. There were two problems that were preventing me from using BIND9: The first issue was caused by the venerable and controversial systemd. Although I had installed BIND9, Ubuntu still used resolved for name resolution. This was quickly taken care of with the following command to disable it:
systemctl stop systemd-resolved && systemctl disable systemd-resolved
After stopping the named service, I was not able to resolve any FQDNs and NSLOOKUP simply produced a CONNECTION REFUSED error.
It was only after looking at the resolv.conf file that I noticed something amiss:
nameserver 127.0.0.53
options edns0 trust-ad
search falconlab.local
As you can see, the last octet of the name server was 53 (the DNS port) instead of 1. This is straight OOB and the address works fine with resolvd but not for BIND9. As soon as I changed the name server’s IP address to 127.0.0.1 and restarted the BIND9 service, everything started to work just fine.