On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Grant <emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I currently use a free service to host the DNS records for my website, > but I'm thinking of running a DNS server on the same machine that runs > my website instead. Would that be fairly trivial to set up and > maintain? If so, which package should I use?
Just to counter all of the scary stories, I recently (within the past month or so) installed bind for the first time and set it up after a few days of googling around and reading docs. It seems to be working properly and securely, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a large amount of dumb luck, finger-crossing and hand-waving involved on my part to get it working. I have some familiarity with editing DNS zone files (on other people's servers) so I wasn't going into it completely blind. I don't know if I'd call it "fairly trivial", but with howto's and google at your fingertips you should be able to get it set up properly if you really want to. Usually the web-based DNS management by your domain name registrar or hosting provider are good enough for most "personal domain" kind of usage (like mine). In my case there was something that their web-based editor didn't support (TXT records on subdomains or something like that), and mostly because I just felt like trying to do it myself. Since they are my personal domains, nobody else will suffer if I break everything. Others are in the (lucky? not so lucky?) positions of administering systems where things actually have to work right the first time and all the time. :)
