newbie question

[Daniel Kirk]

Thanks kevin & everyone else for your responses, you've cleared a lot of
things up for me.

Having the secondary dns on my machine will probably only be a short term
solution, but it will do for now.

Having "setup" dns on my machine, I changed the details of my domain with
internic.  However, doing a whois on my server, I get "No known domain
servers".  This is probably due to the fact that after a reboot I had
forgotten to restart named (derrr) so named was not running when I made my
modify domain request.  I know a few different ways of automatically
starting named when linux is rebooted, but can someone tell me the best way
to maximise security?

I would also appreciate a quick glance at my dns setup to make sure
everything is in order

my resolv.conf looks like :

search mydomain.com mydomain.isp.net
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver my.second.ip.address

my named.conf contains this zone :
zone "mydomain.com" {
        type master;
        file "mydomain.com";
};

The following is in my mydomain.com zone file :

;
; Zone file for mydomain.com
;
$TTL 3D
@       IN      SOA     ns0.mydomain.com. dkirk.bigpond.net.au. (
                        2001030501 ; serial, todays date + serial #
                        8H              ; refresh, seconds
                        2H              ; retry, econds
                        4W              ; expire, seconds
                        1D )            ; minimum, seconds
;
                NS      ns0.mydomain.com. ; Inet Address of name server
                NS      ns1.mydomain.com. ; Inet Address of name server
                MX      10 mail.mydomain.com. ; Primary Mail Exchanger
;
localhost       A       127.0.0.1
ns0             A       127.0.0.1
ns1             A       my.second.ip.address
www             A       127.0.0.1
mail            A       127.0.0.1




So if I changed my name servers at internic again, does anyone see any
problems running my website www.mydomain.com (once I set up the virtual
server on apache) and receiving email in the mydomain.com domain?  Any other
comments on my setup?

thanks again

Dan




-----Original Message-----
From: bind-users-bounce at isc.org [mailto:bind-users-bounce at isc.org]On
Behalf Of Kevin Darcy
Sent: Thursday, 1 March 2001 07:17
To: bind-users at isc.org
Subject: Re: newbie question



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