I’ve wasted massive amounts of time with this one. In the process I was able to clean up the installation considerably. I have some feedback - unsure the best way to get this to anyone who cares.
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Some VPS installations are sensitive to logging issues. The MIAB configuration never worked on my VPS. The simplest workaround is to change nsd.conf to use log-only-syslog: yes, and I would suggest that this should be the default configuration (that will work in most cases). If someone wants to log to a file, they can do their system-specific configurations to enable that.
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I found that a cleaner setup included adding port: 53 to the configuration file. The startup log was very clear and helped me through troubleshooting the underlying issue in my situation. So, it would have been helpful if this had been a default setting; also recommend making it a default.
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And THE change that would have saved me HOURS of troubleshooting would have been if the “Public DNS (nsd4) is not running ( port 53).” status message were changed to “Public DNS (nsd4) is not running (IP port 53).” - include the IP address that was tested. This turned out to be the issue in my situation, and that one additional piece of information would have made a big difference.
In case anyone can benefit from my experience … the status checks uses PUBLIC_IP to do its tests. What happened in my case was that the PUBLIC_IP was not responding to the DNS request, but the PRIVATE_IP was. For whatever reason, my ISP was not handing the port 53 request to the server.