Questions about DNS & Bind book

[Khachaturov, Vassilii]

> pleased so far (don't hurt me, but I usually don't care for O'Reilly
> books, and it took me a while to cave in and buy this one). I'm

I guess the whole "animals" series is pretty good. Check out the perl books
as well, esp. "the camel book".

> On page 68, I see the sentence "named.root is the same file we've been
> calling db.cache". I gulped, because to that point I hadn't seen

named.boot can refer to the root zone cache by any name. It is just that the
default (bundled in the BIND dist.) now prefers named.root name rather than
the db.cache name which had been used in older distributions. Nothing to be
afraid of.

> about the name, except that since the book us prepending all RR files
> with db., it figured it might as well be consistent.

precisely, and now they think that the root zone is in a way another
*configuration* file so they call it named.root to be consistent with
named.boot (root zone configuration, boot time configuration)

> Is there more to it than that? I certainly don't want to be in the
> dark on db.cache.

Hopefully, that clears the dark :)

> like to know is. is Reverse-DNS necessary? I have an ADSL connection
> and 5 static IPs, so right now my ISP does my reverse DNS. Since doing
> my own reverse DNS require my ISPs cooperation (as well as some
> non-octet boundary stuff I've read the RFC on but don't fully
> understand), I'd like to put off doing it for a while if there's no
> harm.

Yes. To do PTR DNS, you need PTR delegation of authority from your ISP, just
as you need the delegation for A/MX/etc. subdomains. It is pretty common
that you have the former but don't have the latter. In these days of virtual
web hosting it might even occur that you actually have 1-2 IP addresses and
several thousands of names mapping to them. Obviously, there's nothing to do
with reverse address resolution in this case, yet you (such a virtual
hosting web provider) do need the name resolution to be managed by you.

Vassilii Khachaturov
http://www.tarunz.org/~vassilii/
Skribu al mi per Esperanto!