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I am setting up Bind using Webmin on my Debian Sarge box for the first time and had a pretty basic question, I think. I plan to host at most 5 domains on this box. I have one master record all set up for one of the domains without problems. I created nameservers, A records, CNAME for www. MX records etc. I ran the domain through the dnsreport.com site and everything looks good.
My basic question is this: when I add my other domains, should I create master zone records for each of the domains or should I create slave zones record (or another type of record) for the other domains? Part of my confusion is the terminology and I keep finding different explanations via Google. I don't care if the other domains point to the first set of nameservers, e.g. domain2.com can use ns1.domain1.com and ns2.domain1.com and that's ok with me. But, I don't mind creating separate nameservers for domain2.com either, e.g. ns1.domain2.com and ns2.domain2.com. I just wanted to know what the proper practice was.
If your DNS is to hold the records for your other domains, then you will have master file db's for those domains as well.
e.g.
zone "domain1.com" in {
type master;
file "master/domain1.com";
};
zone "domain2.com" in {
type master;
file "master/domain2.com";
};
You would use "type slave;" if the DNS you are configuring is going to slave (transfer) the records from another DNS holding the master records.
My guess is that you simply need one DNS holding the records for the domains you manage. Then, you probably ought to look at setting up a slave DNS that can be used as a fallback in case your primary DNS is down. It's config will be similar to the master except with the "type slave;" and with a reference to the master DNS holding its records.
With regards to terminology... you need to stop looking at it in terms of "domains". Instead think of DNS as holding records according to zones. You can be authoritative for whatever zones you want to be authoritative for. Thus you could have zone entries for "microsoft.com" for example... obviously your nameserver isn't known as the authoritative source to the root DNS servers, so any records in your "microsoft.com" zone would only be known to hosts directly using your nameservers.
Certainly you CAN create separate DNS servers to hold different zones... but that might be expensive resource wise.
Go to howtoforge.com and check out their DNS section for some good info on DNS setup.
Thanks for that really informative reply. I appreciate it.
Just so I understand, your suggestion is to separate master zone records, one for each domain. Each domain would have it's own nameservers etc, rather than have the extra domains all point to the nameserves of the first domain.
And yeah, I was not thinking of running separate Bind servers, one for each domain. I was just wondering whether to create separate master zone records, one for each domain, or create just one zone record for the first domain and have the other domains just point to the nameservers of the first domain
And thanks for the howtoforge tip -- checking them out now. I use that site for other stuff and dns articles look excellent.
A slave zone will only create a local copy of the master server for redundancy and speed purposes. You can have just one bind server and host different domains on the server, but you will need a seperate file for each zone not a seperate server. You as you stated yourself may however use a different server for each domain but you don't have to.
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