DNS Lookup   «Prev 

Name Server Configuration File Example

Name Server Configuration File Example
Name Server Configuration File Example
  1. The directory directive establishes an initial path for later file references, to make the file easier to read. In our example, all future file references are relative to the path /var/named.
  2. The cache directive primes the cache.
  3. The arguments of the cache directive are the origin domain for the cache file, followed by the name of the file. In our example, the origin for the cache file is the root domain “.”, and the cache file name is named.ca (actually, /var/named/named.ca, thanks to the directory directive).
  4. The primary directive declares the server as an authoritative server for a particular zone.
  5. The arguments of the primary directive are the origin of the zone and the name of the zone file. In our example, our server is primary (authoritative) for corporation.com, with zone file /var/named/corp.zone, and for the reverse zone 12.143.196.in-addr.arpa, with zone file /var/named/rev.zone.
  6. The secondary directive declares the server as a secondary server for a particular zone.
  7. The arguments of the secondary directive are the origin of the zone, the IP address of the zone’s primary server, and the file name where the zone file is to be stored. In this example, our server is a secondary server for company.com, the primary server is located at 196.144.12.100, and the zone file is named /var/named/company.zone.

Domain Name Server (DNS) Configuration and Administration

At my place of employment, we are using Linux as a DNS server and it performs exceptionally well. This section will address configuration of DNS tables for these services using the BIND 8.x package which is standard with the Red Hat distribution.
Note: Note: Red Hat versions 5.1 and earlier used the BIND 4.x package, which used a slightly different format for its configuration file. BIND 8.x offers more functionality over that offered by BIND 4.x, and as 4.x is no longer being developed, you should probably consider upgrading your BIND package to the latest version. Simply install the BIND RPM package (see Section 10.1 for details on using the RPM utility), then convert your configuration file to the new format.
Fortunately, converting your existing BIND 4.x configuration file to be compliant with BIND 8.x is easy.
In the documentation directory provided as part of BIND (for example, /usr/doc/bind-8.1.2/ for BIND version 8.1.2), there exists a file called "named-bootconf.pl'', which is an executable Perl program. Assuming you have Perl installed on your system, you can use this program to convert your configuration file. To do so, type the following commands (as root): 
cd /usr/doc/bind-8.1.2
./named-bootconf.pl < /etc/named.boot > /etc/named.conf
mv /etc/named.boot /etc/named.boot-obsolete

You should now have an "/etc/named.conf'' file which should work with BIND 8.x "out-of-the-box".
Your existing DNS tables will work as-is with the new version of BIND, as the format of the tables remains the same.