TheBonsai’s Blog

Hi folks…

I have nsupdate running on my home router to update my zone with a specific A record on every IP change - some kind of an own DDNS service.

After I changed the operating system distribution on my Router from some older Mandrake to a Debian 4, the updating was broken:

key option argument should be keydir:keyname

“Okay, they changed the option argument syntax” I though - I quickly adjusted the script but…

dst_read_key: error reading key

Hmpf… What the hell happened? Maybe the default key format changed or similar - I generated a new key but… nothing.

I finally found the solution - guess what:

• I have the debian bind and dnsutils package installed
• the bind package has a /usr/sbin/nsupdate
• the dnsutils package has a /usr/bin/nsupdate
• I had a 50:50 chance to use the right one - but I lost, the right one was the one in /usr/bin

After I knew what it was, I searched a bit on the web, and I found a similar issue related to some BSD derivate. I don’t know if that’s a general problem of the BIND distribution from ISC, or a Debian-specific problem, but I hope this article can help you in that situation.