CentOS

Ok

I did a vanilla install of bind onto a centos 6 box and dhcp on another. Got everything working after the usual typos then checking the /var/log/messages file kept on the dns server kept getting messages about "error (network unreachable) resolving address xxxxxx" and an error with "<zone name>.jnl create permission denied". After checking directory permissions, loads of websites, looking at selinux logs and all sorts of other things, I eventually read a book I've got by Cricket Liu and Paul Albitz. It said that .jnl files are created alongside the zone files (doh) checked that permissions of /var/named and realised that the installer had set the following "-rwxr-x---. 5 named named", changed it to "-rwxrwx---. 5 named named" and hey presto everything fixed.

Thought I'd post this in case somebody else starts wasting time looking for the solution.

dicksog

A better solution would have been to leave the permissions of /var/named alone, and use /var/named/data for your authoritative zones and /var/named/slaves for your slave zones. The respective config in named.conf would have been file "data/example.com"; (or slaves) instead of file "example.com";

bind as shipped by CentOS has those directories set up out of the box.

There's also an selinux boolean specifically to allow bind to write to its zone files.