What do you do when you try to create a new subdomain in cPanel and you see:

 The zone for the root domain domainname is missing, or could not be read. The
ip address will be read from the webserver configuration and a new zone will
be created for this subdomain. Created DNS entry for subdomain.domainname The
subdomain, subdomain.domainname has been added.

 And no domain gets added? And Google's no help? Thankfully LiquidWeb helped me with this one!  

The issue started yesterday when my largest hosting client was unable to create subdomains for their demo domain. (I guess in a way it's good that it was their demo domain and not one of their client's domains!) They would create the subdomain in cPanel, and the folder within public_html would be created, an entry added to httpd.conf, but nothing would change with Bind.

 I was temporarily able to limp along by adding the A records to named myself using Webmin (I love that software!) however that was very problematic because if someone attempted to load the new subdomain in a browser before it was created by me, then their ISP would cache the fact that sed subdomain did not exist.

 Google was not of much use. I saw lots of suggestions to turn off "Disable whois lookups for the nameserver IP manager." in WebHost manager, but that had no effect. Apparently a lot of people who receive the "The zone for the root domain domain.com is missing" error are shared hosting cPanel customers and do not have their DNS set up properly... but that's not me.

At first when I contacted LiquidWeb about it,  they responded that it was a DNS issue because I wasn't hosting my own DNS. (I am, I just use MyDynDns as a slave backup in case I have DNS / connectivity issues). Plus this issue was with every domain on my server and it just appeared! It wasn't a DNS / registration / name server issue. I was starting to get worried -- would this ever get fixed?

Then I stumbled onto something: if I tried to edit any zone in WHM's (very poor) "Edit a DNS Zone" interface (the one I never use because Webmin is so much better), the zones came up empty!!! That's not right! Started to sound like a permission error to me. I sent my findings to LiquidWeb and that's when they were able to track down the cause of the issue and fix it for me: Missing perl modules!

 Hello Josh,

I just had to reinstall perl modules. If you're comfortable with shell,
you can do the following, mv /root/.cpan /root/.cpanbak
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules

> Andrew,
>
> Thanks for fixing this. For my knowledge so I can prevent/fix this if it
> happens again, what exactly was the problem and what fixed it?
>
> -Josh

So thanks for saving the day (again), LiquidWeb!