[lug] DNS, named and RH6.1

[Nate Duehr]

Hi John, 

There's some mixing of terminology in your message, but no big deal.  I
think I know what you're trying to do.

First:  If you're building a caching nameserver, you don't need any zone
files on your server, by default.  The server simply builds a cache by
doing queries for your machines to other nameservers.

(For the moment we'll avoid 127.0.0.x reverse zone, broadcast zone,
and a localhost zone... all nameservers should have those to comply 
with the RFC's.)

So... you're actually attempting to build a nameserver that is
authoritative for the zones in question, it would appear from your post.
But not registered with a registrar.  Nothing wrong with that, DNS
admins do this all the time to have names resolve to different IP
addresses inside organizationss than those same names do outside from
the Internet, so it's a valid setup, and of course, if you're just doing
it for the learning experience, that's cool too!

The issue with the @ in your zone file is an ORIGIN statement problem.
That appears to be the cause of the double ajstarkey.com.ajstarkey.com.

Post a copy of your named.conf and your zone file to the list and I'll
be glad to help you out.  Or send it privately if you like...

Of course the ultimate authority on DNS on Unix systems is "DNS and
BIND".  It's starting to get a little dated again, and needs a fourth
edition (or maybe it already has it), and you can pretty much ignore
most of the information about BIND 4 in it (if you're running BIND 4 on
public machines, you're nuts at this point.).  But it's descriptions of
how DNS works and what specifically to do with that knowledge to set up
a BIND server is nice to have in a single book.  I'm looking forward to
seeing similar work for BIND 9.

Anyone else notice that Cricket Liu (Acme Byte and Wire) has closed up
shop and sold out to NSI?  I was hoping to go take one of their advanced
classes on BIND 9 someday... sigh.  BUMMER.

On Sat, Jul 15, 2000 at 12:45:03PM -0600, John Starkey wrote:
> Hi all again.
> 
> I'm trying to set up a caching DNS for the experience of doing it, more
> better pay maybe? :}
> 
> I am a little confused about the sequence of events. Here's what I see as
> happening, could someone correct me if I'm wrong?
> 
> #nslookup ajstarkey.com
> 
> the kernel looks at /etc/resolv.conf and finds 
> 
> search ajstarkey.com
> nameserver	192.168.0.2 
> nameserver	205.139.34.25
> nameserver	205.139.34.24
> 
> then looks for the 192.168.0 in /etc/named.conf, finds it then looks for
> 192.168.0 (using reverse DNS) and finds 0.168.192.in-addr.arpa which
> refers to /var/named/named.192.168.0. Now does it look at
> the 
> 
> 	NS	 ajstarkey.com
> 	
> record in the file? I thought it would look at the SOA at the top, which
> is ns.hughes.net, and be shipped off to that domain to check out that DNS
> before climbing back up the tree. I could swear it does, which might explain 
> the result of 
> 
> ajstarkey.com.ajstarkey.com
> 207.138.82.242
> 
> Before I started using "@" in place of ajstarkey.com in the
> 
> ajstarkey.com		A	207.139.82.242
> 
> record. Which returns:
> 
> ajstarkey.com
> 207.138.82.242
> 
> Hughes.net has a record of ajstarkey.com behind a firewall and I can only
> use mine internally. So I think that explains the doubling of the
> ajstarkey.com in the nslookup results. But can anyone ellaborate on it? Is
> it because my machine (192.168.0.2) claims to be ajstarkey.com while
> hughes claims 207.138.82.242 (my static IP) to be ajstarkey.com, making
> 192.168.0.2=ajstarkey.com a subnet name. In other words, is named 
> appending hughes.net's ajstarkey.com to my 192.168.0.2? 
> 
> I hope this is clear enough. It's the weekend I don't expect anyone to
> spend an hour commenting. I played around with this (and d-loading Oracle
> with my soon to be obsolete 56k) for 20 hours yesterday. (I settled for
> Sybase til TCI shows up.)
> 
> By god, I've confused myself again!? Let me have it--baptism by fire.
> Errrr.
> 
> TIA,
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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