If you're expecting a simple rndc or named.reload to work, and it kicks out this ominous error you don't understand, the wiki or newslist solution may mislead you.

Before you do anything else, check to see if named is actually running. There's a few ways to do this:

% ps -aux | grep named

% top (and just look for named)

But, hard stopping named and starting it up may be your best beet. On FreeBSD, you can type in /etc/

% /etc/rc.d/named stop
% /etc/rc.d/named start