Howto Turn Off DNSSEC

If you find yourself having problems while DNSSEC is configured and you have carefully assessed that the problems have to do with the validation, and have assessed you are not under attack, you may want to follow one of the following steps to disable DNSSEC. Please be warned, do not take disabling DNSSEC lightly, it may make you vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks.

You need administrator privileges and to restart the server to re-read the config file.

1. Permissive mode

Does not actually turn off dnssec, but stops the resolver from withholding bogus answers from clients. Resolution may be slow due to validation failures but can still proceed. Add to the unbound.conf file:

server:
    val-permissive-mode: yes

2. Remove trust anchors

If you remove the trust-anchor definitions from the unbound.conf file, DNSSEC is not used for those domains. Related options:

server:
    # trust-anchor-file:
    # auto-trust-anchor-file:
    # trust-anchor:
    # trusted-keys-file:

3. Disable the validator module

This also disables validation for other domains. In the unbound.conf file:

server:
    module-config: "iterator"

4. Stop a broken chain of trust

To work around a broken chain of trust use a temporary item until the proper DS or DNSKEY records are published, put in the unbound.conf file:

server:
    domain-insecure: "example"