installing bind

[Techie]

"Simon Dodd"

> Jacob, 
> If you're going to also be administering the box as well as installing
> it, the best advice you're going to get is to invest in a copy of "DNS
> & BIND" by Albitz & Lie (O'Reilly , ISBN 0-596-00158-4). This book is
> widely regarded as the Bible for DNS in general and BIND in
> particular, and it covers everything you're likely to want or need to
> know about getting BIND, installing it, configuring it and maintaining
> it when it's running. 
> 

I have the book and all ARM files and everything else, as well as src and 
NIN files and so on and that doesn't make me much wiser.
It simply proves I really know nothing about it to begin with and that is 
not really funny.

Here is my situation.

A) I have never used BIND before, and the simplest one to install and get 
running was 4.9.6 for NT. Bind 8.x and 9.x simply wouldn't install and 
the installer provided from ISC fails all the time saying the service 
already is there and it wont uninstall to begin with.

B) No I will not install Linux on this box just to get Bind up and 
running.
Why? Because this is a Windows box and dedicated for other stuff and I 
dont intend to re-invent the wheel and another 7 million things just to 
have Bind running as I simply need a secondary box to run NS from.

C) I have zero or hardly any knowledge of Linux or Unix and dont intend 
to buy 500 books on the topic, learn three new languages and stand upside 
down on my head drinking water to get rid of weird hickups just for the 
purpose of getting BIND to run.

Now having said that, I am of the clear opinion that if BIND was released 
for NT then it should also be able to run and operate as such.

90 % of all information released about BIND is targeted towards 
Linux/Unix users, which may be fair for them but thats not what some of 
us endusers are trying to accomplish here.

----To get to my question....

Provided I manage to get the thing to run, why in heavens name do I have 
to specify the information in several different files when the data is 
less than 500 bytes per domain which I wish to add into the bind zones?
This seems very redundant and creates a nice little overhead of manual 
editing here. Disregarding this fact, when looking in the book for setup 
and installations, there seems to be a lot of cross referencing to this 
one file and then back to that one again.

Is it to much to ask for a simple instruction set in the following 
form...

    "X:\DirPath\To\The\File\FileName.Ext"
         "Here is what should be in the file"
         'Here is why...'

Information distributed in this format would reduce the learning curve 
for almost anyone! I'm willing to bet on it.

When I look at the install of BIND 4.9.6 I have the files as follows...

C:\DNS\NAMED\  << here is everything

Then it references in the book that you should change information in a 
file named named.boot

As it turns out, named.boot is not where I installed it to be but in 
WINNT instead... ok... 

So I look in there and find RESOLV.CONF.... hmmmm hold on a second
there is a RESOLV.CONF in the install directory too...
Which one is used, why and where does it say so???

Am I alone about being confused here or is the information simply 
intentionally confusing to prevent learning?

Could someone PLEASE make a list of the files installed and where they 
really go, and preferably make a simple example with two or three domains 
in it? That would really truly help emensly and reduce the need for us 
newbies having to sit and scratch our heads asking the same questions a 
gazillion times.

    Thanks for reading this.
    Techie