DNS with BIND 9

masseya · Posted: Thu May 30, 2002 3:39 am Post subject: DNS with BIND 9

I've been trying to setup DNS on my network with BIND 9 and I don't really know a whole lot about BIND regardless of the version. I've been told that you have to be pretty careful what references you look at because it's changed a good bit between versions. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a good (free) reference for setting up BIND 9 on a small network. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
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Nitro · Posted: Thu May 30, 2002 11:32 am Post subject:

I can help you, if you share with us what you already have, and what you want to do. Your best friend for this 'man named.conf'. Goodluck.
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Hellfire · n00b Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 54 Location: Madison, WI

In addition: Bind9 ARM

-h

masseya · Posted: Thu May 30, 2002 8:52 pm Post subject: Simple network with DNS

Thanks for the quick responses! I'm always amazed by how fast people are able to provide accurate information on this BB.

For some background information, I'm setting up a small home network with less than 10 computers. I'm a college student and I have a lot of friends with laptops who have wireless NICs. (Purdue University has a wireless network on campus.) My goals are to understand the basics of networking and be able to provide some simple services for my own network such as DNS, external ssh, and a basic firewall. I have a wireless router that would work to achieve my goals under most circumstances, but my ISP (Nomet) doesn't like to do things in a 'normal' way. :evil:

Nomet uses a modified, rate-limited DHCP setup where you log on to their network and they give you a DHCP'd IP address that lasts only 30 seconds. Then they analyze who you are via MAC address and give you a bandwidth appropriate to what you need (in their opinion). Basically, this means that if you are surfing the net you'll have a lot of bandwidth, but if you are downloading anything they don't give you much at all. The idea is to prevent the network from being deluged by people downloading thousands of MP3's, but the result is that people who have ligitimate computing needs are screwed.

Regardless, I have been totally unable to configure my wireless router to function properly on this network, even though it's capable of MAC address spoofing. I am >< this close to getting basic things (like DNS) working via my gentoo box. What I really need is a simple DNS configuration for a small network where all IP's are basically just assigned (no DHCP). I think I'm going to try and figure it out this weekend and see what questions I have. I'm almost glad that my ISP sucks because it's been quite fun to dig in and learn some of this stuff on my own.

As an aside, I was completely shocked that I was able to install Gentoo on a computer via this network. I even called Nomet to attempt to figure out why I succeeded, but they seemed to have a windows-only support group that wouldn't connect me with someone who knew anything about networking. To be honest, the entire breadth of my knowledge of their network is based on things that my roommate and I have pieced together from experimentation. The reason that I thought gentoo wouldn't succeed is that any period of idleness on the client's part of the network would result in being disconnected. I thought that while gentoo was compiling something, it would be disconnected from the network. Does gentoo download something while it compiles something else? Would that possibly improve the speed of installing things on a network where bandwidth was severly limited for large downloads?

Just food for thought...
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if i never try anything, i never learn anything..
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masseya · Posted: Fri May 31, 2002 12:54 am Post subject: man page package?

What package has the man page for named.conf? I've tried

Nitro · Posted: Fri May 31, 2002 1:18 am Post subject:

It is probably in the bind package, try:

kabau · n00b Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 6 Location: Austin, TX

Hi, I wouldn't recommend BIND for this application if I understand it correctly. It sounds like you need djbdns as it's a much lighter implementation and has lots fewer features than BIND. BIND is extremely powerful, and serving DNS for a small LAN will hardly scratch that feature-set. Also, BIND can be quite daunting to configure for those new to setting up DNS and the like. I've not used djbdns myself, but it has been recommended for light applications like yours by people whose opinions I respect.

Also, it sounds like you really need to setup a DHCP server so you don't have to assign IPs to people. They can just attach to the network and have the Gentoo server give them an IP. That's what I do on my home network with a wireless bridge. Makes it easy for people when they come over, and when I take my laptop around. You also don't have to tell people about changes if you make them. Their box will just pick up the changes from the DHCP server.

So, I'd emerge net-misc/djbdns and net-misc/dhcp.

My $0.50,
kabau

masseya · Posted: Fri May 31, 2002 2:27 am Post subject: man pages...

Well, I just tried

roman · n00b Joined: 20 May 2002 Posts: 17

As we were talking in #gentoo, there is probably a bug, there is no
named.conf man file in bind package now...

Roman.

P.S.: I'm also looking for this "masked" man page :-)

Nitro · Posted: Sat Jun 01, 2002 9:28 pm Post subject:

masseya · Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2002 3:28 am Post subject: man.conf

Well... I am going to give djbdns a try, but I can't access the man pages for that even though I have successfully emerge'd djbdns-man. Then I tried emerging the fixed BIND 9 package and still couldn't access my man pages. Is there something that I might have wrong with my man.conf file? I'm pretty sure this is I'm using the standard man.conf file, but here's a copy just in case: