Does named/BIND log startup errors?

most daemons log to /var/log/daemon. errors sometimes are also logged to /var/log/messages. you can check this by looking at the syslog configuration file /etc/syslog.conf.

the configcheck util for BIND is named-checkconf. it's a bit tricky, if you run your BIND chrooted.

first start with:

named-checkconf

to check the zone files also:

named-checkconf -z

in a chrooted environment try this:

named-checkconf -t /var/named -z

BIND will write startup errors to syslog.

Hence the logs will appear wherever your syslog.conf says they should go (typically /var/log/messages).

I'd look in the default system log. On my system it's /var/log/messages but I bet that's distribution-dependent.

There are two verification tools, one for the configuration file itself, and one for zone files. In Debian, they are called:

• named-checkconf
• named-checkzone