Dns

cornish · 06-05-2008, 03:52 AM

I'm struggling to understand BIND on a Linux box

I know that at my work we use a Linux server for DNS so I presume that is bind. What I don't understand is where the records are stored and where I can create manual entries and delete entries.

At my old work they used windows, and I could happily add manual CNAME records for certain situations or delete records that were out of date.

Can any one explain to me how I view what records are stored on my Linux DNS server?

indeliblestamp · 06-05-2008, 05:58 AM

The main configuration file for bind is /etc/named.conf. Have a look at it, and you'll find the path to the zone files where the actual records are stored. That mostly should be in a place like /var/named.
You'll need to look up some guide for the rest of the info. e.g. http://www.howtoforge.com/traditional_dns_howto

billymayday · 06-05-2008, 06:02 AM

It depends on your setup, and mine runs chrooted, so the files are all in /var/named/chroot/var/named. There I have the zone files along the lines of "named.example.com".

For non chrooted versions, I guess /var/named would be the location, or versions that run bind as bind rather than named (I have no idea why RH versions refer to named even though it's really bind), I would hesitate a guess at /var/bind

Look for named.conf,bind.conf or bind9.conf - it should tell you what the zone files are called

salasi · 06-05-2008, 07:55 AM

At home you've probably got a caching nameserver. In other words this only keeps temporary copies of information that it finds elsewhere. At work, you may be both caching (for say the 'net) and being the primary reference (for some, or all, internal servers).

By design bind does not keep on disk copies of the stuff for which it is not the master reference.

Try reading the reference material suggested (or DNS and Bind by Albitz and Liu) and I'm sure you'll understand.