Setting up DNS for virtual domains

[Kevin Darcy]

Mostly Harmless wrote:

> I'm going to try to explain this as bast I can though my understanding
> of a lot of these issues is shaky at best.
>
> I help admin the student computing organization's servers at my school.
> We would like to offer full virtual domain service to our users, but we
> do not have a 2nd level domain -- our main domain is wso.williams.edu,
> also known as gertrude.williams.edu. For now, we ask the school's tech
> guys to change the DNS whenever we need to a new computer. I'm
> comfortable staying with that arrangement, but a lot of users have
> registered domains with places that don't provide DNS service. We can't
> get the school DNS to change every time this happens, so we've decided
> to set up our main machine as DNS Nameserver. There's two main issues as
> I see them -- the actual DNS configuration on the gertrude and getting
> the machine "known" as a Nameserver out in the wide world.

You get the nameserver "known" by adding it to the delegations for the
domains you want to host. Most likely, this is something the domain owners
will need to do through their respective domain registrars, e.g. Network
Solutions, Register.com or whomever.

As for the actual configuration of "gertrude", look at the many available
online sources of documentation and/or get the  _DNS_and_BIND_ O'Reilly
book

> Issue 1: I've looked far and wide on the Internet (probably not far and
> wide enough) for resources telling me how to set up virtual domain
> service. Most of the examples are for Bind 4.x which make things tough
> (we're running 8). Essentially, we'd just like to have a lot of
> different domains point to the same IP: gertrude's. We'll sort it all
> out with Apache later (I can handle that part). But I just can't seem to
> figure out how to do this -- we won't be providing DNS service for
> the name gertrude.williams.edu or wso.williams.edu -- we just want to
> specify 10-20 domains that should point to gertrude's IP.

This is fairly trivial. Just add an A record with that IP address to each
zone.

> Issue 2: As I understand it, none of this means much unless I can
> specify gertrude as the nameserver for these domains. Currently, I'm
> told she's not a valid nameserver. Does this mean I need to get the
> person who runs DNS for gertrude (the school) to edit the DNS records
> just this once and specify gertrude as a Nameserver?

No, this is probably because "gertrude.williams.edu" is really just an
alias for "wso.williams.edu". You can't use an alias name in a delegation,
you have to use the real name, i.e. "wso.williams.edu".


- Kevin