newbie question

[Kevin Darcy]

First of all, you need 2 nameservers to run a domain. You said you had only 1
address. Is your ISP going to run a slave then?

You can call your nameservers anything you want, as long as at some point
those names are known to DNS (i.e. they have A records). Generally, folks will
give nameservers names in domains that they control. In that case, just add
those names to the zonefile for the domain. And don't worry about the names of
the nameservers being in the domain you're registering, since there are
so-called "glue records" which take care of the chicken-and-egg aspect of
this. That's why the registrars ask for both the names *and* the addresses of
the nameservers, because sometimes the name itself isn't enough.

Moreover, if you're registering in a gTLD (generic top-level domain) like com,
net or org, you don't even need to have a running nameserver before
registering the domain, since the registrars don't check that. Some of the
ccTLD (country-code top-level domain) registries are more strict about this,
though, and, besides, it's a little rude to register a domain and not have any
nameservers running for it, since that will cause query failures and/or
timeouts for other nameservers trying to look up names in the domain.


- Kevin

Daniel Kirk wrote:

> hi there,
>
> I've spent over a day reading materials on Bind and it seems simple enough
> but there are a couple of points which are really really confusing me.
>
> I have my own server with 1 ip address hosted by an ISP.  I want my server
> to be the Primary & Secondary DNS servers for my domain.
>
> I am (quietly confident that I'm) running named.
>
> If I were to change my name servers with internic, I should specify my
> Primary DNS server having the IP of my machine (right?).  But what do I use
> as the name of the machine?
>
> Say my machine is called a.b.net (where b.net is the name of my ISP), and I
> want to host the domain www.mydomain.com.  I want my Primary dns server to
> be dns0.mydomain.com and my secondary server to be dns1.mydomain.com, and
> for www.mydomain.com to use these dns servers.  Is that possible, or do I
> need to have mydomain.com using different name servers before I can setup
> dns0 & dns1.mydomain.com?
>
> If my machine is called a.b.net (Where b.net is the name of my ISP), how do
> I go about naming my name server that is apparently running?
>
> Hope these questions make sense, I think I'm not too far away but am just
> confused by a few simple things
>
> thanks
>
> Dan