I lost you again... Isn't that zone (externaladdress.com) supposed to be in both the internal and external views?
In external use:
And in internal

Not really sure if it does actually... but I will differ to your judgment and experience.

I think I am getting lost in the semantics of DNS terms. I am not, nor do I think I want to be, the designated authority for the domain name (at least not to the world again this may be my lack of clear understanding). I think noip.com is handling this for me. Noip provides me the ability to create an redirects the domain requests to the relevant locations based on the domain/subdomain of the request.

• www goes to a hosted server in VA,
• the rest are pointed to my local web servers which is running many virtualhosted sites. This server require the full domain name not the ip address to determine which site it should serve up.

My goal is to capture/intercept (systems within my LAN) request for DNS lookups specific to the domain (or rather sub domains of) external.com that would normally resolve using external DNS authority. I need to do this because (and don't ask me why... some thing to do with the way the vps services sets up the virtual network nics) the local web servers will not resolve to my local clients using the authoritative external DNS records. The "world" however can access the web servers with no issues.. go figure.

The views seem like an ideal way to deal with this... as I can manual fix the problem on each client machine by adding the local ip address to the hosts/lmhost file on each machine. If I need to have a zone on the external view for the external.com domain then so be it. I have been reading feverishly on the subject but most of the books are either WAY over my head, and/or seem to be geared to enterprise solutions for DNS gurus. There would appear to be an opportunity for a "basic" book that focuses on setting up a private DNS for the small office/SOHO environment... with various examples of different scenarios.

So, if I can understand you well, you have noip as an authoritative nameserver to resolve dns lookups for your domain from external clients and you want the hosts in your lan to use an internal nameserver, so they get an "internal" name resolution (the local IPs of your servers).
If that's the case, you don't need views. Just setup bind as a master for your domain (line in your post #12).
Then configure clients to use your dns as a resolver. E.g. for linux boxes use 1st in /etc/resolv.conf

I will try that... thank you

I have set up multiple zones and they all resolve. Very cool and powerful. I am getting the functionality that I was looking for and I have a better concept of how Bind works.... at least to the extent that the books are starting to make sense.

One glitch that I did not anticipate (but makes total sense to me now)...
One of my private zones "local DNS overrides" is a blanket coverage for the entire domain myftp.org. This domain is a free noip.com domain that I am using a sub domain from. I set the subdom up a while back because I did not want my domain name "brand" associated with a clients content.. but did not want to buy an additional domain. It was a economical giveaway that the client really appreciated.

The issue is that if I ever happen to need to access some other subdom from within the myftp.org domain it will "of course" come back as:
nslookup www.myftp.org
Server: 192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53
** server can't find www.myftp.org: NXDOMAIN

So my question is: can I define a "master zone" file to enable it to forward unknown DNS request for the domain (like say 123.myftp.org) to an actual authority? See below.

Hi,

.
So, I guess there was no need to use views for your setup?


Again I'm not sure if I can get what you're trying to do, but if you want to define a different NS for a subdomain like 123.myftp.org, you can use $ORIGIN:
Regards

I actually kept the views (it was working so I decided not to muck with it)... I just left the external view blank.... just in case I decided to use it someday. I can't image it will impact the service.

I had already added the zone as you indicated (actually I have about 5-6 zones now.... having too much fun.) Love it when things work and I actually "get it".

What I was wondering was if it is possible to have a private zone for only parts of a domain.
AKA:
; private clients on the LAN
Myclient IN A 192.168.1.3
;All others
*othersDoms forward nameserver

But have all others requests use the public DNS.
I realize this is probably a idiotic question. I was thinking that there might be a wildcard option to point all non-listed subdoms for the specific zone to a different name server? Kind of like the forwarding is doing for the DNS.

This is not possible. You can have a wildcard host, pointing to an A (or CNAME) record, but not forwarding to another dns.

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