How to control own domain/zonefile ?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <el9kcb$2d0r$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 Clenna Lumina <savagebeaste at yahoo.com> wrote:

> --- Barry Margolin <barmar at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> > > 3) And finally, I want my bind to also foward 
> > >    outside-destined requests to our ISP's DNS 
> > >    server(s), that way the clients can use the 
> > >    Linux's ip for DNS for everything.
> > 
> > Why do you want to do that?  What's wrong with the default
> > behavior of 
> > iterating from the root servers?
> > 
> > But if you really prefer to use your ISP's servers rather
> > than iterating 
> > yourself, use the "forwarders" option.
> 
> I wasn't aware it worked like this. Do I understand 
> corectly that the default behavior is to simply 
> check all the root servers and transverse down 
> the line?

Yes.  Out of the box, with no special configuration, BIND is a perfectly 
usable caching server.

> 
> Would this mean that, for example, a web site updates 
> it's IP for it's hostname, I would get this update faster 
> then if I used my ISP's dns (which can be rather slow 
> updating... friends of mine always seem to get those 
> sort of updates quicker on their ISPs.)

It shouldn't really make a difference, since your server and the ISP's 
servers should be playing by the same rules.  The original record 
contains a TTL that says how long caching servers are allowed to cache 
it before checking to see if it's changed.  The main difference is that 
you can easily restart your personal server to clear its cache, while 
getting your ISP to do that with their caching servers is likely to be 
difficult.

>  
> > > I also want to be able to keep the mydomain.com zone 
> > > file seperate from the local.mydomain.com zone file, 
> > > as the latter is for the LAN only and need not be 
> > > accessible from the internet.
> > 
> > zone "mydomain.com" {
> >   type master;
> >   file "db.mydomain.com";
> > };
> > zone "local.mydomain.com" {
> >   type master;
> >   file "db.local.mydomain.com";
> >   allow-query { 192.168.1.0/24; localhost; };
> > };
> 
> Thanks you very much. I assume the "file" parts refer 
> to actual zone files? (I have worked with zone files 
> before so I have some idea of how to do them, I just 
> never setup my own name server before now :-) )

Is there a reason why you haven't been using the book "DNS & BIND", 
which explains all of this?

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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