Hello,

I have recently installed Fedora on a Dell 8200. I used The Perfect Setup as a quide for installation.

My question concerns DNS. If you refer to the link above (page 2) you will see the section where you are to enter the Primary and Secondary DNS. I understand what DNS is and how it works, but what DNS servers need to be entered here. I use Zoneedit.com for the DNS of my registered domain name of my website stored on this machine, but where do these DNS servers fall into place? Should I enter my router DNS address? or, are they just for the naming system of my local network? If so, why did these instructions want me to enter these IP addresses? It is a little confusing to me; could someone explain this to me?

Thanks in advance...

those should be the DNS server you want your own desktop to use to lookup names....usually your own ISP's.

However, in my personel setup, my DNS server is my router, which then uses my ISP's DNS.

However2, my ISP's DNS servers suck, so i use 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2....I "believe" it is OK to use these....they resolve to be GTE servers and noone has complained to me so far.

To clarify...let me create a scenario to help me understand.

From my new server (Fedora), if I ping say, "WS1", what DNS does it look at first? or, if I entered the DNS IP of my router in the Fedora setup, would it look there first, and if not found, would it direct the request to the DNS server setup in my router to my ISP?

if you set it for your router IP, i think it would first "look" there, meaning your router probably then asks your ISP's dns server. if it can't find anything there, it goes to the secondary one, etc. you can put as many as you want in the /etc/resolv.conf.

if you have specific domains you want it to always assume, you can add those in the "search" parameter after the nameserver, e.g.:

nameserver 192.168.0.1 4.2.2.1
search mydomain.net

that lets you ping (or contact, access, etc.) anything on mydomain.net just by the hostname because it assumes the FQDN (e.g., if WS1 were a host on mydomain.net, just doing "ping WS1" would work).

Thank you, it makes perfect sense now.