Questions about DNS & Bind book

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris  <chris at tourneyland.com> writes:

    Chris> Also, I read the part on configuring Bind for reverse DNS. What I'd
    Chris> like to know is. is Reverse-DNS necessary?

Yes. If it wasn't necessary, it wouldn't exist. OTOH, reverse DNS
might not matter to you.

Reverse DNS lookups translate IP addresses into names. This can be
important: some web and ftp sites won't let you in unless they can
perform a reverse lookup of your IP address.  Some sites/services go
further by checking that reverse lookups and forward lookups match up:
the UNIX r- protocols for instance. [If the reverse lookup doesn't
return a name which matches an entry in /etc/hosts.equiv, the server
denies rlogin or whatever access.]  Similar things are done for remote
file acess, printing and when TCP wrappers are used. Whether these
things matter to you or not depends on what sort of things your users
are going to do and how the network servers they access auuthenticate
your user's requests.

You say your ISP is managing the reverse entries for your IP
addresses. Provided you're both happy with that arrangement, you might
as well continue with it. However you might not want reverse lookups
of your IP addresses to return names like XX-YY-adsl.some-isp.whatever.