Hi everyone!

I am trying to make a DNS server for INTERNAL IP addresses only. I just want to be able to resolve IP addresses in my own network. These are not static IP's as I use DHCP, so that is why it is a little harder. ANYWAY. Is there a how-to doc on how to setup BIND for INTERNAL stuff only, and not go outside the network??? I hope this makes sense. Any and all help appreciated!

only dhcpd 3+ can manage dynamic domains in conjunction with bind. and i've yet to find a document that acutally explains it. there are proprierty solutions that work, but as for the standard open source pacakges, i don't think it's really up for it. i've spent hours trying to make it work, as you need to use secure keys and such like in bind, rndc and dhcpd so that dhcp can dynamically alter the local host file. it aint easy, and tehre are no docs! How big is this network? do the ip's actually change? most dhcp servers will continually give the same ip to the same machine time and time again, inwhich case you can hard code it into bind. maybe go a little step further and force certain ip's to each dhcp client in the first place, which is a pretty conventional thing to do.

That is soooo not the answer I wanted to hear! I know what you are saying about hard coding, but that wouldn't work if I wanted to ping a PC from another PC by name (unless I define resolv.conf on every PC, which I do not want to do).

Now I am depressed!

well one of the pages i tried with was: http://www.performancemagic.com/howtos/ddns.php i did everything, but nothing happened, and also i couldn't find anything to debug, so i kinda hit a brick wall... you can still do what you want, but in a more static way, if you set up your local zone file correctly then you can ping with a host. there's also a more crude approach of building a script file to take the dhcpd.leases information and build a zone file out of that and restart the nameserver, but that's not too nice. i only use a small network but i just set the ip's in both dhcp and bind. like i said though, on a low contention network you are not normally going to get a different ip address, wether you wanted one or not.

oh... you mention about setting resolv.conf on each machine? that certainly wouldn't be necessary, as defining an nic to be set up by dhcp will recreate the resolv.conf file anyway. maybe you actually mean the /etc/hosts file? but anyway, if you are doing dns then this central server would need to be listed in resolv.conf anyway, and it would be the responses from that server that would return the info, not on each machine.

is this gibberish or do you get what i mean? i tend to not finish senten

well...? ahm a waitin...

Sorry about that. I wanted to try out that website you mentioned too, and I didn't get no where with it either. I did laugh with your last line though . I did indeed mean the /etc/hosts file. Sorry about that. Playing so much with Linux that my file names sometimes get screwed up.

Well I hate to come to a dead end here - But I am not sure if there is anything else I can do.

i'm not sure where your dead end is, in that last answer there is a complete solution that only requires administration of two servers on one single linux box. you will never need to manually configure each client, guarenteed.