Custom DNS not working, but built-in DNS does work

I installed Mail-in-a-Box onto 165.227.110.239. The domain is box.givingtools.com. At some point, I then moved the installation directory (mailinabox) to /root/mailinabox and updated a few symlinks (/usr/local/bin/mailinabox & /usr/local/bin/mailinabox-daemon) to point to the new installation directory.

Now it appears that custom DNS is broken. If I dig some of the built-in DNS entries (such as dig mail._domainkey.givingtools.com txt), I get a proper response. But for a custom DNS record (I added x.givingtools.com TXT arbitrary text), I don’t get a response.

Here’s my entire custom DNS page:

I updated the nameservers almost 2 days ago. The status checks confirm that everything is OK (except givingtools.net, but that’s still propagating, ignore that).

Even when ssh’d into the box and I run dig @localhost x.givingtools.com ANY, I don’t get a response.

Looking in /etc/nsd/zones/givingtools.com.txt, I see my “x” entry: x IN TXT "arbitrary text"

If I were to guess, I’d say that something screwed up when I moved the installation directory. Any ideas?

The issue was I had CNAME records with the same name as the built-in records, this is not supported by the standard. (MIAB added the givingtools.com MX record, and I added the givingtools.com CNAME record)

I had to add a logfile directive to nsd.conf in order to notice this error. See this issue on GitHub: https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/issues/1239