Error: "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN"

A response of "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" in a web browser when visiting a site indicates that the browser is unable to resolve the domain name to an IP address. One cause of this issue may be that your server is not resolving domain names.

As of cPanel version 84, the default nameserver installed is PowerDNS. Previous versions of cPanel installed BIND as the default nameserver. The following message in cPanel's installation log (at /var/log/cpanel-install.log) indicates that PowerDNS was not configured correctly during the cPanel installation:

PowerDNS does not act as a recursive (caching) nameserver and your resolv.conf file references a local IP address.

An incorrectly configured PowerDNS may result in DNS resolution issues such as "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" when visiting a site hosted on your server. To ensure that PowerDNS is configured correctly, first ensure that remote nameservers such as Google's are set in /etc/resolv.conf:

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Next, forcefully reinstall PowerDNS:

/scripts/setupnameserver --force powerdns

PowerDNS should now be configured correctly and serving DNS requests.