Hi everyone,
It it possible to setup a bind server for my internal network at home? Currently, all clients DNS requests go to my Verizon FIOS router, which also acts as a DHCP server. I would like to setup a another DNS server using BIND for studing.

Current setup:
Client --> Router (DNS Server) --> Internet

New BIND server setup:
Client --> BIND Server (2nd DNS) --> Router (Primary DNS) --> Internet


How would I go ab this? Would I have to configure a cache naming DNS server?

Thanks guyz

Hi there,

My knowledge of BIND itself is somewhat limited, but I think what you are asking is a more general DNS question so I'll take a stab at it...

As long as your primary DNS server (your router / ISP's DNS server) is available, your client will never use your secondary server, so setting your internal BIND server as your secondary DNS server is not really the way to go.

If all you want your internal DNS server to do is resolve your internal addresses (like most corporate network's DNS servers do) then your primary server should be your BIND server, and you do not really need a secondary, although it may be useful for the cases where your turn off your BIND server and wonder why you can't access the net

You then configure your BIND server to use your ISP's DNS server as a 'forwarder'.

So, if you try to lookup an internal address 'my-pc.my-lan.local' your BIND server will resolve it, then for everything that it does not know the answer to, it will query your ISP's DNS servers and then cache it.

Well, if you want to learn Bind, Bind is the way to go. OTOH, if you just want a setup that works and works well you could choose something that was simpler to set up and you might choose something that was more secure. Up to you.

There is a very limited point in this configuration. Your router will only have a very small dns cache (small maximum number of entries) where a computer-based one can have a cache that is larger. But with the limited expiry of dns entries this will only do you a limited amount of good (if any).

Alternatively....

• if the problem is that your isp has dns servers which do not perform well or reliably connecting your own dns server to other upstream servers (or arranging that it preferentially chooses one of adequate performance from a lit) makes sense
  
• if the problem is that you don't trust your provider's dns, again connecting to other servers (but not your isp's servers) makes sense
  
• if the problem is that there are many queries locally (eg, a box with squid, as squid tends to be a bit profligate with dns queries) and you want, for performance reasons, to keep the latency of these queries down, a local dns cache could make sense. I'm still not sure that hooking your cache up to your router's cache adds much, though, as that config probably has higher latency on a cache miss (and, as explained above, you are unlikely to get into the situation in which you have a miss from your computer-based cache and a hit from your router-based one).

You might want to look at this guide.

en.kioskea.net/contents/intranet/resdns.php3