Chapter 32. The Domain Name Server
| IN THIS CHAPTER
In Chapter 22, "Principles of TCP/IP Networking," and Chapter 23, "Configuring Basic Networking Services," you learned how DNS (the Domain Name System) provides a common naming scheme for finding hosts on the Internet, eliminating the need for users to memorize IP addresses. You also learned about the process of setting up a FreeBSD machine to gather domain name information from a designated server. However, you now come to the topic of configuring the FreeBSD machine to act, itself, as a domain name server, providing lookup information to itself and to any client machines that wish to use it. Domain name service is one of the most complex single subjects in network administration. Although it's fairly easy to set up a web server on each of as many different servers as you might install in a network and on as many occasions as might come up in your network's lifetime, the installation of a name server is something that typically is done just once. In many cases, the installation is handled by a "guru" whose efforts quickly become folklore to the rest of the network staff, resulting in a DNS setup that is hard to maintain or even understand. Administrators who know DNS inside and out are far less numerous than those who don't. This chapter cannot attempt to describe DNS exhaustively. For that purpose, there are lengthy books devoted to the subject. This chapter's purpose is to enable you to set up your FreeBSD machine as a basic name server in any of several common configurations. |
