Help! Bind on RH Linux 9

Kevin Darcy kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Wed Jan 7 02:55:34 UTC 2004


DTS wrote:

>Hi,
>
>    I'm using the default installation of BIND that comes with RedHat
>Linux 9.x. I need to use it as the authoritative DNS for my domain. Is
>the default installation of BIND on this version of RH caching-only,
>or can it be used for just about any DNS purpose (does modifying
>named.conf effect this)?  
>
I would imagine that the default installation is caching-only. It's kind 
of hard to make authoritative nameservice the default, when you don't 
know what domains to be authoritative for, or the data with which to 
populate those domains...

>When I try nslookup locally on the DNS
>server, it fails to find the service at all (;; connection timed out;
>no servers could be reached). Yet, when I can verify with chkconfig
>--list that named is indeed running. How can I pick out the named
>service from a netstat listing?
>
Look for something listening on port 53.

>    Other questions...What should I set my server hostname to? 
>
That's not really a DNS or BIND question. Set it to whatever you want 
the name to be. There are certain rules about how hostnames can be 
formed. If you stick to numbers and letters, you should be fine. If you 
want to be a little bit fancier, you could use a dash, but not at the 
beginning or end of the name.

>How can
>I ensure that /etc/resolv.conf cannot be overwritten by the system
>once I make changes to it?
>
Usually, the thing that overwrites /etc/resolv.conf is the DHCP client. 
You really shouldn't be using DHCP anyway for a box that's going to be 
an authoritative nameserver, so disable that service and configure your 
IP/gateway/netmask statically. If something else is overwriting 
/etc/resolv.conf as superuser, there's really not a lot you can do about 
it other than identify what's doing it and disable that part of its 
operation.

                                                                         
                                                      - Kevin




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