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PowerDNS continually dies after creating a slave zone

#dns #powerdns #fail

Issue

When PowerDNS is configured for a sqlite or sqlite3 backend and a slave zone is added, the PowerDNS daemon continually dies and respawns. This loop persists until the daemon is forcibly terminated.

My logs showed the following:

Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: PowerDNS 2.9.22 (C) 2001-2009 PowerDNS.COM BV (Jul 29 2009, 04:47:43, gcc 4.3.3)     starting up
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: PowerDNS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are   welcome to redistribute it according to the terms of the GPL version 2.
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: DNS Proxy launched, local port 22293, remote 192.168.8.1:53
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: Launched webserver on 0.0.0.0:8081
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: Master/slave communicator launching
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: Creating backend connection for TCP
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: gsqlite3: connection to '/var/lib/powerdns/pdns.db' succesful
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: gsqlite3: connection to '/var/lib/powerdns/pdns.db' succesful
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: About to create 3 backend threads for UDP
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: gsqlite3: connection to '/var/lib/powerdns/pdns.db' succesful
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: 1 slave domain needs checking
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: Domain domain.local is stale, master serial 349, our serial 0
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: Initiating transfer of 'domain.local' from remote '192.168.8.40'
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: gsqlite3: connection to '/var/lib/powerdns/pdns.db' succesful
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: AXFR started for 'domain.local', transaction started
Jul 29 12:12:38 localhost pdns[14465]: Communicator thread died because of error: Database failed to start transaction:     Error while retrieving SQLite query results

Cause

The PowerDNS sqlite and sqlite3 backends do not support slave zones as of v.2.9.22

Resolution

Configure PowerDNS to use a different database backend: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.