Creating Forward and Reverse lookups

[Kevin Darcy]

ismgr at journey.com wrote:

> I'm a serious newbie to Linux and I apologize if this is a really dumb
> question.

"Serious newbie"? Does that mean you're a newbie who's serious? :-)

> I'm running Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 on an older machine that we would
> like to use as an internal name server for our LAN.
>
> I have been using the webmin utility to configure the server settings
> and have sendmail and apache working, but not BIND.
>
> When I attempt to create the forward lookup master zone, I can do this
> by entering the domain name, the master server (same) and the email
> address for problems.
>
> Documentation that I have read suggests that the reverse should be the
> same operation, creating another master zone,but selecting the
> "reverse" (addresses to names) on the second master zone.
>
> When I attempt to create this second zone, I get an error saying that
> there is no network by the name of "mydomainname.net".
>
> Any ideas why I can't write this change to the named file?

I don't know much about webmin, but your reverse zone should probably be
somewhere under in-addr.arpa, e.g. 168.192.in-addr.arpa for the
192.168/16 network. The only exception would be if you're implementing
so-called "classless delegation" (see, generally, RFC 2317), in which
case you can, with your upstream provider's co-operation, store your PTR
records anywhere you want, including if you wish in your regular
"forward" zone or some descendent zone thereof.

In general, for "serious newbie"s, I'd recommend obtaining a copy of the
O'Reilly _DNS_and_BIND_ book (currently in Fourth Edition). There's a
fairly steep learning curve here, and the O'Reilly book is widely
considered "the bible" on the subject.


- Kevin