BIND DNS

From PhoenixWing

Why setup BIND DNS for a small home network? In my house, I have multiple systems and a high speed Internet connection. Our server handles our file sharing, documents, game saves, music, downloads, patches for this and that. Then we have two workstations, mine's dual boot, and Kyle's is all WinXP. Then I have a spare Linux box for toying with, Kyle has a multimedia PC that he uses for hooking up to our TV streaming movies, and we have a laptop. 6 computers... there's actually more computer, but they're all fried, and thus, don't count. Tack onto that number, the number of gaming consoles that are Internet capable through ethernet (Gamecube, XBox, PS2, etc). There's also the chance a friend or relative might bring over their computer.

Behind our high speed cable modem, we have a 4 port router. Behind that, a 8 port switch. This gives me a total of 13 ports, or 13 possible connections, considering there's no wireless. My router is set to offer DHCP to anything requesting it at the IP's of 192.168.1.100+, leaving 192.168.1.2 through 192.168.1.99 free to use as a static IP. I set my network up so any servers use 192.168.1.2-.10, personal computers use 192.168.1.11-20, and gaming systems use 192.168.1.21-30.

Though I may end up with more wiring in my house than carpet, I figured I'd like to set up each machine with its own IP, and keep control over which IP's are allowed to access my file server. Yes, even in my own house, I'm a stickler for security and control. Thus, I wanted to setup my internal network with hostnames for each IP. I chose a rather, unroutable domain name of "int.domain" and set up my file server to do DNS, and this is how...

1. Install your linux distro's version of BIND. Also known as "named".

2. Locate the named.conf, rndc.key and rndc.conf files. Some distro's may not have rndc.conf, that's ok for now. A typical install of BIND will place the named.conf & rndc files in /etc. Though distro's such as Gentoo tend to put them in /etc/named/ or /etc/bind/.

OK, you have everything installed, you know what you're going to name the internal network, and what IP range you're going to use. Change to the directory where your 'named.conf' file resides, and edit it.

3. cd /etc (/etc/bind, /etc/named)

4. vi named.conf

... More to Come! ...