New to DNS

[Andy Shellam]

A zone is basically a point in the DNS tree, from which everything under 
it is delegated to a server.

e.g.  Imagine this DNS path for server uk1 of my network:

uk
co.uk
mailnetwork.co.uk
exchange.mailnetwork.co.uk
uk1.exchange.mailnetwork.co.uk

My zone starts from mailnetwork.co.uk, which means 
uk1.exchange.mailnetwork.co.uk is in the zone of mailnetwork.co.uk.
If I wanted, for example, the DNS of exchange.mailnetwork.co.uk to be on 
a different nameserver (ie. a different zone) I would need to delegate 
exchange to nameserver2 from within the zone mailnetwork.co.uk. Then, 
exchange.mailnetwork.co.uk would be "sub-zone" of mailnetwork.co.uk

Generally speaking (although this is the incorrect way to think of it) a 
zone is the "DNS description" of a domain (e.g. mailnetwork.co.uk.)  
This is incorrect because zones can start from any point within a 
domain, as explained briefly above.

So, in your case, for each of your domain names, you would have a zone - 
which means 7 zones on your server.

www.xname.org is a good service to use as an outsouced secondary name 
server - your domain names nameservers (set in your domain registrar's 
control panel) would be set to NS1 - your server, NS2 - ns0.xname.org, 
(optional NS3 - ns1.xname.org.)  Xname's servers would look to your 
server for any changes in the zone file, and external clients could 
query any of the 2/3 servers to get the records for your domain.

However, if you only want to setup these few sites and are too worried 
about setting up the DNS server correctly, use Xname as both the primary 
and secondary name servers - their web interface will have you up and 
running quickly, then delegate your domain's DNSs to ns0.xname.org and 
ns1.xname.org once the DNS is live on Xname's servers.

Andy.

Sutabi wrote:
> I am a web developer more then a network admin and DNS has always
> scared me. I started out with a shared host, then a vm server and now
> need to move to a dedicated server and I have only problem is I have to
> setup dns stuff.
>
> Currently I have about 7 sites, I'd like to mirgrate onto this server,
> apache is already setup as well as mysql and so on.
>
> So I have 1 server, 4 ip addresses and 7 domain names. Bind 9 is supose
> to be completely written and easier to deal with so I've compile and
> installed it but I'm a bit lost on Zones. Also name servers baffle me
> since I only have 1 server, cant nameservers run on the same server as
> my http/mail/database?
>
>
>
> !DSPAM:37,4501744333921541375126!
>
>
>