bind9 fails to start after an upgrade to Debian Buster

i’ve done a routine upgrade to Buster on some server and all went fine… except bind9 no longer started.

every attempt to restart it ended up with long waiting and an error message:

root@xyz:~# service bind9 start
Job for bind9.service failed because a timeout was exceeded.
See "systemctl status bind9.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
root@xyz:~# journalctl -xe
Aug 16 18:38:25 xyz systemd[1]: bind9.service: Failed with result 'timeout'.
-- Subject: Unit failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://www.debian.org/support
--
-- The unit bind9.service has entered the 'failed' state with result 'timeout'.
Aug 16 18:38:25 xyz systemd[1]: Failed to start BIND Domain Name Server.
-- Subject: A start job for unit bind9.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: https://www.debian.org/support
--
-- A start job for unit bind9.service has finished with a failure.
--
-- The job identifier is 15979 and the job result is failed.

logs did not contain anything interesting – actually they showed that bind would start and then after ~ a minute was shut down. i’ve ruled out that the issue was caused by my configuration – the server did not start even with the default content of /etc/bind.

the culprit was an old systemd override file that i’ve created ages ago to pass some parameter to named. after removing /etc/systemd/system/bind9.service.d/local.conf and systemctl daemon-reload the dns server started.

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