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Build a DNS server on Linux using BIND

Red Hat includes a BIND RPM on the CDROM. You can often download the latest version of BIND RPM from Red Hat's "Rawhide" directory on any Red Hat FTP mirror. Packages from Rawhide should be considered experimental (it's the staging area for Red Hat's next version) but I've found Rawhide packages to be quite stable.

When installing an RPM, use the -U (update) option, not -i (install). Only the kernel package needs -i. For all other packages (including BIND), -U has the effect of removing any package with a lower version after installing the new package, and it works fine if no previous package is present.

The example zone file lacks a default time-to-live. The last field in the SOA record no longer provides this value, and now represents the "negative caching time" for the entire zone. It represents how long a client should a negative response to a query.

The default TTL is now entered using a $TTL statement at the top of the file.

For more info, see RFC 2308.

The terms "master" and "slave" have been replaced with "primary" and "secondary". As a rule, secondary servers for a domain should be on a different network segment to provide availability in the face of a router failure. Free secondary service for small domains can be had at http://secondary.com and http://www.zoneedit.com.

If you just need a caching nameserver, then install the Red Hat caching-nameserver RPM. This provides pre-tested BIND configuration files. These files also serve as good baselines for your own customization.

Using SuSE 7.0 (better hardware peripheral support), installing from source, how do I go about setting up a simple caching nameserver? SuSE supports RPM, and I have installed a few RedHat RPMs successfully on my SuSE system, have you heard whether or not the caching-nameserver RPM for RedHat will work on SuSE?

The Red Hat caching-nameserver package should work fine even if you don't have RPM. The package is simply a set of BIND config files, including named.conf and a root zone hints file.

If you don't have an RPM database, you can use rpm2cpio to extract the files and install them manually to the correct directories.

Once installed, start up named and you have a caching nameserver. Adjust your resolv.conf file to use 127.0.0.1 (the loopback address) for your nameserver and you're in business.

A good beginner's administration tool for BIND is Webmin (http://www.webmin.com/). Webmin provides lots of modules for different Linux subsystems, including modules for BIND 4 and BIND 8. The module for BIND 8 can be used with simpler BIND 9 configurations.

Webmin's BIND 8 module should NOT be used to manage dynamic zones (an advanced topic) at this time. A 3rd party module for dynamic zone management is under construction.

I come from a MS shop, and Windows 2000 uses "Dynamic DNS". Do any versions of Bind provide the same functionality. Also are there any Gui based administration tools for DNS/BIND.