Topic awaiting preservation: Debian DNS Server... (Page 1 of 1)

I'm having the hardest time setting up my zavaboy.net domain to my Debian machine. I looked at http://www.aboutdebian.com/dns.htm and I didn't get anywhere for days. I allready reinstalled Debian countless times because I keep screwing things up.

Is there another tutorial somewhere that is more clear cut? ...or a bunch of examples of what zone files should look like and how they work? I would like a better understanding on zone files.

I'm on a local network, the machine is connected directly to the router. Running a clean install of Debian 3.1r1a.

Whenever one is looking for how to do a specific thing on Linux, a good place to turn to initially is The Linux Document Project where there are a whole bunch of good, indepth How-To documents. Including this one on Setting up a DNS Server


Justice 4 Pat Richard

I already looked through there... but apparently I didn't look hard enough.
Thanks!

Edit: (spelling)



(Edited by zavaboy on 10-26-2005 00:11)

I have a DNS server up and running on FreeBSD, but it uses bind, and the configuration should not be all that different on Linux and FreeBSD. I do not know if debian has bind pre-installed, but it might.

On BSD it runs as the deamon named.

DNS is not easy because if you flub it in some little way it can take a while to figure out if it is working correctly. It took me about 2 weeks to get the DNS working the first time.

You will want to read the entire man page set on dig. It is a very useful tool. Look up some tutorials on it, and that should help as well. You will need that to debug.

On my box I have a folder /etc/namedb which has all of the configuration files.

PROTO.localhost-v6.rev
PROTO.localhost.rev
codetown.org
localhost-v6.rev
localhost.rev
make-localhost
named.conf
named.root

The localhost files were created for me by the make-localhost script (which I believe use the PROTO files as templates). The things that I had to modify are the named.conf, and I had to create the codetown.org.

codetown.org:

$TTL 3600

codetown.org. IN SOA ns1.codetown.org. admin.codetown.org. (
                        2005070902      ; Serial
                        10800           ; Refresh
                        3600            ; Retry
                        604800          ; Expire
                        86400 )         ; Minimum TTL

; DNS Servers
@    IN NS   ns1.codetown.org.

;
; Host Addresses
;
localhost       IN A    127.0.0.1
ns1             IN A    69.207.190.123
ns2             IN A    69.207.190.123
mail            IN A    69.207.190.123
webmail         IN A    69.207.190.123
hephaestus      IN A    69.207.190.123
maigelbra       IN A    69.207.190.123
blanda          IN A    69.207.190.123
estelle         IN A    69.207.190.123
prms            IN A    69.207.190.123
@               IN A    69.207.190.123
www             IN A    69.207.190.123

@               IN MX   10      mail.codetown.org.

named.conf

options {
        directory "/etc/namedb";
        pid-file "/var/run/named/pid";
        query-source address * port 53;
};

zone "." {
        type hint;
        file "named.root";
};

zone "0.0.127.IN-ADDR.ARPA" {
        type master;
        file "localhost.rev";
};

zone "1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.IP6.ARPA" {
        type master;
        file "localhost-v6.rev";
};

zone "1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.IP6.INT" {
        type master;
        file "localhost-v6.rev";
};

zone "codetown.org" {
        type master;
        file "codetown.org";
};

You should be able to use my files as a template. The important parts are the last bit in the named.conf which tells the bind deamon how to work with codetown. The entirety of codetown.org is important. You will have a number of things to do here, but this is a real world working example.

You will also need to setup your box as a name server with your registrar. I use godaddy, so if you need help there I can most likely write up something for that.

I hope this helps. If you continue to have problems with this copy and paste the contents of your config files here and send me an email codetown-ozoneasylum@gmail.com as I definately check my email but I can not guarantee that I will see this thread being updated.

Dan @ Code Town

That HowTo I linked to up there goes step-by-step thorugh setting up a named configuration on Linux


Justice 4 Pat Richard

A few questions:

• If I don't have a slave server, what happens if my server goes down and someone tries to visit the site?
• Is it critical that I have a slave server?

WM: I use GoDaddy also, but I think I have everything figured out there. Thanks for the help.

If you don't have a slave server, and your main server goes down, they may or may not be able to contact your site, depending on if other servers external to your comptrol cache your listing. And even then the cached listing will only last for so long before it too gets cleared. if you have a slave server it should be able to take over from your main server should it go down. Whilst it's not critical that you have a slave server, one of the first things we are taught in 'Net Design 101 is that if you can possibly afford redundancy (having more tan one of something available/running) then do it, because You Never Know.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

Also if you webserver is on the same box as the DNS server it won't really matter. If your DNS goes down your webserver is down as well.

Dan @ Code Town

I got it working!

http://zavaboy.net:81/

I have to use port 81 because my brother has his Windows server on 80. Is there a way around this, so both of us can be on port 80 yet they access the same sites as usual?

That depends, are you using a router to make forwarding decisions based on requested port?


Justice 4 Pat Richard

Yes.

In that case, no, you can't. However there's the alternate HTTP port at 8080 if you wish to move your site there. Or his site there. Since you've put in the hard work of setting up the DNS server I'd say his site.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

You might also be able to setup apache to forward requests for his site to him. I am sure there is a way that apache will do this, but I have not done this myself. Your webserver would switch to 80, and then port-forward to him on 81 or 8080 or something.

If it where me I would dump the IIS and have a main server, and use the other one as a backup DNS or DB server.

Dan @ Code Town

I'm not exactly sure I'm fully understanding... Can port 8080 be used when just going to a domain without specifying any port?

The problem is that he's (my brother) is overly protective of his site, he doesn't want ANYTHING to change. Yet I want port 80... Is it just me or do I smell conflict in the air?

Both servers technically are not my brother's nor mine, but owned by the family business. I've tolds him that I have been making progress and have been learning a lot just by setting up my DNS server and will talk to the president of the company (Dad) if I need to, yet he is using his server for personal uses (personal website, game serving, TeamSpeak, and you can probably guess others) and some of it doesn't even work, like PHP can't send mail, he has a few problems with his PHP Nuke, and it's rather slow too in response time.

I don't see why he should be hogging everything when I could be learning career building skills.

No for you to share hosts you're going to need to have something map requests for his domainname to go to him and for your domain name to go to you, otherwise to use more than one port for your particular IP.

In Apache you set this up via the VirtualHosts directives (name-based virtual hosts). I'm not sure if you can map requests from one to the other machine but it's probably possible. One other solution you could do is an smb mount between your two machines. So your instance of Apache runs both sites, configured as a virual hosts. His files could be on a mounted SMB file system (ie you need to check out samba). It would do nothing to his config except work probably better.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

you might want to put up an index.php file. Right now I get an Index of / page and some of your PHP files are not being parsed.

Later,

C:\

Well, the other possibility is to have three NICs in the DNS server, and have it map requests for him out one nic, and requests for you out another.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

How do I do that?