Re: A very basic question...

2009-08-10 Thread Kevin Darcy

E Johnson wrote:
From what I have read so far, I can see that this might be a very 
flame-worthy question, so please don't hurt me, I'm just a beginner...


I have read every howto that I can find on setting up a DNS server for 
a very small, 12 seats, network. The DNS server just needs to be 
authoritative for the internal network and then it should forward 
external requests to the outside world. Here is the question...


Most of the howtos say that I should setup a Root Zone so that I can 
access the Internet. Then a small few of the howtos say that I should 
use the forwarder option to be able to access the Internet and they 
say that the Root Zone should not be used because the Root DNS servers 
aren't meant for that.


So, which is the best/proper way to do this?
I'm assuming that all your clients have a need to resolve Internet 
names. (Note that this is not a *given*. If clients access the Internet 
through application-level proxies or gateways, then maybe only the 
proxies/gateways need to resolve Internet names, and normal internal 
clients do not.)


So, the big question is: does your nameserver have direct access to the 
Internet DNS?


If not, then you don't really have the option of setting up a root 
zone. You have to forward, and given that you're doing that, your 
nameserver would resolve anything it needs in the root zone via 
forwarding. Hence, no need for an explicit root-zone definition.


If you do have direct access to the Internet DNS, then you have other 
alternatives and maybe you should re-examine your assumption that ... 
it should forward external requests to the outside world. Maybe you 
don't need to forward at all. You could explicitly configure a hints 
file, or use the one which is already compiled into the named binary.


- Kevin

___
bind-users mailing list
bind-users@lists.isc.org
https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users


Re: A very basic question...

2009-08-09 Thread Doug Barton
E Johnson wrote:
 From what I have read so far, I can see that this might be a very
 flame-worthy question, so please don't hurt me, I'm just a beginner...
 
 I have read every howto that I can find on setting up a DNS server for a
 very small, 12 seats, network.  The DNS server just needs to be
 authoritative for the internal network and then it should forward
 external requests to the outside world.  Here is the question...
 
 Most of the howtos say that I should setup a Root Zone so that I can
 access the Internet. 

You are either reading or mis-reading the wrong howtos. You don't have
to do anything special to enable recursion (looking up answers on the
wider Internet). Just configure your internal zone(s) and you should
be fine.

What you probably DO want to do is restrict recursion to your local
network. The easiest way to do that would be to add the following in
the options section of named.conf:

allow-query { localhost; localnets; };

Good luck,

Doug
___
bind-users mailing list
bind-users@lists.isc.org
https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users