Typical Web Hosting Setup for BIND

[Will Yardley]

Adam Retter wrote:
> Hi, We are planning to get to the point where we are running two DNS
> servers on Bind
> ns1.cosmic.org.uk - 212.104.137.9
> ns2.cosmic.org.uk - 212.104.137.10 (NOT YET OPERATIONAL)

you should try to put them on separate networks (geographically, and not
in the same netblock).

> Is it possible to setup records on the primary (ns1) and have it
> update the secondary (ns2) of new/deleted zones without having to
> change the named.conf on the secondary every time i make a
> addition/deletion on the primary.

make a set of simple scripts to do this. all our zone files and
configuration files are generated by perl scripts, and then the
secondary named.conf file (well all the zone entries) are generated into
a file on the master, and pulled using scp to the slaves.  you can setup
cron jobs to run these and then you don't have to worry about it.

> Also what is the best network addressing scheme to use ?  At the
> moment each customer connects to mail.theirdomain.co.uk for email
> which is then just an A record to mail.cosmic.org.uk and for web
> access they have www.theirdomain.co.uk  which is also an A record to
> an IP attached to earth.cosmic.org.uk So at the moment for each new
> domain I setup I have to create A records for mail. and www. which
> simply points to mail.cosmic.org.uk or www.cosmic.org.uk

yup - that should work pretty well.

> How do ISP's manage large amounts of domains and how do they perform
> their naming of hosts etc and virtual serving (multi-homing) of email
> and web services.

with automation.  virtual serving of email and web stuff is pretty OT
for here, but it's all widely documented.  there are similar mailing
lists / newsgroups for Apache, sendmail, etc. etc. we use name based
virtual hosting, so each machine has 10-25 individual instances of
apache each with its own IP, and each apache has about 20-60  domains on
it.

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