I'm a Linux Newbie who needs some assistance configuring BIND9. Please help!

I have a home network of 3 Windows 2000 client computers hooked up to a Linux server (which in turn is hooked up to my cable modem). The Linux box runs Mandrake 8.1 and routes traffic with iptables. It also hosts my website.

I registered assorted.org a while ago to serve as a domain for my website. I soon grew tired of pop-up ads and shoddy redirects, and have spent some time wrangling with registrars to try and host the DNS for it myself (allowing myself more freedom with it). I listed my IP as a nameserver (ns1.assorted.org) and started trying to configure BIND9.

My demands were fairly simple; I wanted to be able to host a website on the server that subdomains would point to by default (so users would be directed to the server whether they typed www. or not) and to be able to host certain subdomains on other computers (I have a webcam on one of the clients that I'd like to stream with).

Unfortunately, I've had a very difficult time finding out how to accomplish this. All the websites I've been to either offer very specialized examples of configurations (that I can't seem to tinker with correctly) or very generalized examples (that I can't seem to tinker with correctly).

Here's my network information:
66.169.27.198 - Internet IP
192.168.0.1 - server IP
192.168.0.3 - gimli (win2k client)
192.168.0.7 - kevin (win2k client w/ webcam)
192.168.0.21 - compaq (win2k client)

assorted.org has ns1.assorted.org listed as its primary nameserver, and ns1.assorted.org is listed as 66.169.27.198.

The config files (zones,SOA,etc) don't seem very difficult, but I can't find a comprehensive explanation of how they work. If someone could either work out the configs I need or point me to an example that very closely resembles my own situation, I would be their best friend.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO.html

the DNS howto really does contain everything you'll need, i set up my home network using just the howto and nothing else, and it was very detailed and useful.

Thanks, Chris. I read through the HOWTO more closely this time and got it working. Sort of. I can serve pages on the server itself (the computer connected to the cable modem), but I still can't figure out how to serve pages on an "interior" computer. I have records such as the following in my assorted.org zone file:

localhost A 127.0.0.1
ns1 A 192.168.0.1
weasel A 66.169.27.198

How would I write a record to send traffic pointed at, say, squirrel.assorted.org to 192.168.0.21, a computer wholly within my network? I want to be able to host pages on both computers at the same time.

You cant send out addresses which are internal to your LAN.
The machine receiving them will look into it's lan with those numbers...

Apache can redirect based on the virtual name, http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
or you can use a proxy server on the first machine and ACL rules to redirect to the other machines, http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/FAQ/F...d-accelerator.

Regards,
Peter