[lug] DNS and a thanks for the DSL info.

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Aug 27, 2000 at 11:10:21AM -0400, John Starkey wrote:
>Does this mean I will neeed to rely on them to enter my records?? That's

This is for *REVERSE* DNS only.  I don't know if they can set it up so
that they can delegate the reverse to your DNS server.  I would hope that
they are, but with USWest you can never tell.

Reverse is what what happens when you connect to a remote site and it
asks "Hey, I have this IP address...  What's the name associated with
it?"

Forward DNS is all determined by what that domain record says.  Forward
DNS lookups are when somone asks "what's the IP address associated
with www.example.com?".

>It tells me the localhost addy and the name of the server. But tells me
>the server is returning an error. So how do i start the server?? Maybe

If you are running a RedHat-based system you can do "service named start".
You can see if the server is running by doing "ps awlx | grep named".

>this is the /usr/sbin/ndc (the resolver??) and named (the server, based on

ndc is the "name daemon control" program.  Once the server is running,
you can use ndc to make it do various things.

>> 	search example.com
>> 	nameserver 127.0.0.1
>
>So does the "nameserver 127.0.0.1" have an RR or is this just something
>that resolv knows to look for and where?

IP addresses don't have to resolve to anything to work (except in current
RedHat "ping" if you don't use the "-n" option, but that's another story).
127.0.0.1 is the address of your local host, you don't need any resolving
functioning for it to work.  However, your BIND setup probably came with
a reverse file for 0.0.127.in-addr.arpa (reverse for 127.0.0.*).

>This is one I never see. Using "restart" I get the [ok] [ok] but never any
>entries in messages.

Make sure syslogd is running I guess.  After you get the "ok"s make sure
that named is running.  If you aren't getting those messages either the
logger is off or you have told it not to log those things.  You can try
adding "*.*<tab>/var/log/all" to the end of /etc/syslog.conf and doing
"killall -HUP syslogd" -- that will create a log file /var/log/all which
will contain ALL messages the syslog daemon sees.

If you set up /var/log/all, note that it probably won't get rotated so
you'll need to either turn it off or set it up in the logrotate config.

>So you actually set up these records on your machine?? I'll try them. I've
>used three different books and the HOWTO and tried all the simple examples
>I could find.

Yes, I did.  Worked fine.

Sean
-- 
 Good idea: Slaves Girls of Gor
 Bad idea: Slave Girls of Al Gore.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python