The BIND Module

The BIND module opens to a screen with two sections (Figure 8-1). The upper portion of the page is devoted to global BIND options, such as other DNS servers, logging, access control, and more. The lower portion of the display provides a number of icons, one for each of the zones your BIND is responsible for. This will include all Master, Slave, Forward, and Stub zones.

Figure 8-1: The BIND start page

Configuring your BIND server is an area where Webmin can really make things simpler. Even though DNS is a very simple service on the surface, the BIND configuration files are notoriously confusing, and it is very easy to make a mistake that will render your name server useless. That's not to say you can't misconfigure your name server with Webmin, but it does make it a lot easier to generate a syntactically correct BIND configuration.

Note 

There are three BIND versions in common usage today, specifically versions 4, 8, and 9. BIND 8 and 9 are functionally identical in many ways and share a configuration file syntax, so that a working BIND 8 configuration will very likely also be a working BIND 9 configuration. BIND 9 adds a few new features, but is primarily a rewrite of BIND 8 (the reasons for the rewrite are irrelevant for general users). Webmin has two BIND modules, one for 4 and one for 8 and 9. Because version 4 is extremely old and pretty rarely used outside of OpenBSD and older UNIX environments, it will not be covered here. BIND 8 and 9, because they share the same module and configuration syntax, can be covered together. Features available only in BIND 9 will be noted as such.