[lug] DNS/BIND for a home network

[Elyse Grasso]

I own a domain name, data-raptors.com which is administered through my ISP. I 
access the general internet sporadically, through a slow dial-up line. At one 
time I had a fixed IP address. I'm not sure whether it still is fixed or not.

I want to set up a nameserver for my home machines to use talking to each 
other (the one Win2k box is annoying about acknowledging that the others 
exist, even with its hosts aand lmhosts files filled in. I'm not sure running 
DNS will help, but it seems worth trying). The machines are on a 192.168.2.0 
network. (Work uses 192.168.1.x -- the hosts file on my laptop is .... umm 
... odd).

I assume from reading up on BIND that I should make the home machines a 
subnetwork of my official domain name -- something like 
home.data-raptors.com. I don't think I want to have the full domain delegated 
to my home machines until I have a 24/7 broadband connection of some sort: I 
suspect delegation would complicate my email delivery, (which is mainly what 
I use data-raptors.com for in the first place).

Should I ask my ISP to delegate home.data-raptors.com to me somehow, so that 
my local DNS servers won't get confused when they are connected to the 
Internet and able to talk to the server that is authoritative for 
data-raptors.com?

Assuming that I set up home.data-raptors.com, is it possible for me to give 
the machines canonical names like xerxes.data-raptors.com without bothering 
the ISP to do so?

Are there any really good discussions of combining NAT and BIND that someone 
could point me to? (I just bought DNS and BIND 4th ed, since the 3rd ed 
didn't cover a lot of the stuff I'm running into... not sure I'm 
comprehending it yet.)

At work I have a slightly different problem, since we do intend to run our 
own mail and web servers once I get things configured, but I will still need 
to deal with NAT, I think.

Thanks for any help, 

Elyse