lookup

posted 13 years ago by Ben Cordero

Its all about choice. [1]

or Why I love Gentoo

In further attempts to circumvent this lousy Sky branded home router (from Netgear), I've now setup a DNS caching server on juniper. It also serves as an authoritative server for the local network.

Installation was fairly painless, and gentoo helped find the bits of config that I didn't know how to fiddle with. Gentoo provides the tools, and literally shows you how to install new software from scratch. Furthermore, once you have compiled and installed code, it can give you a leg up to configure, run and use the shiny new software.

Installation

Step 1/. Get tired of typing ip addresses for common things.

Step 2/. Edit /etc/hosts and C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts files to map names to ip addresses.

Step 3/. Get tired of maintaining/synchronizing multiple hosts files all over your network and decide that you really need a DNS server.

Step 4/.

eix -c net-dns/*

to find a list of available DNS servers. Settle for BIND.

Step 5/.

emerge -av bind

and adjust USE flags as desired.

euse -i [flag] [...]

is your friend.

Step 6/. Sit back and watch 6-cores of multi-threaded awesomeness happen. Unfortunately, this step won't take too long.

Step 7/.

qlist net-dns/bind | grep etc

brings up a list of configuration files. Edit them accordingly.

Configuration

Step 8/. Realise you don't know wtf you're doing to the configuration files.

qlist net-dns/bind | grep man

brings up a list of man pages.

Step 8a/. Read the man pages.

Step 8b/. Give up on man pages.

Step 9/. Look for more documentation.

eix net-dns/bind

tell you where to find the website.

Step 9a/. Read the Bind9 Administrator's Reference Manual (ARM) paying particular attention to the contents page, and in particular chapter 6 which points you towards RFC 1035. Read the examples.

Step 9b/. Understand the examples, verify your knowledge google('bind zone file')[1]. {2}{3}

Step 10/.

qlist net-dns/bind | grep sbin

showed you something called

named-checkconf

and

named-checkzone

Use them wisely.

Run and Test

Step 11/.

/etc/init.d/bi<tab><tab>

gives you grief.

/etc/init.d/named start

gives you favourable results. It also runs named-checkconf :D.

Step 12/. Test the server.

Step 12a/. Remember to reset/comment out the previous hosts files. edit/cleanout /etc/resolve.conf.

#/etc/resolve.conf  
nameserver localhost  
domain localdomain

Step 12b/.

This is why you followed the past 11 steps

Step 13/.

rc-update add named default

Makes things persistent over reboots.

Extra Credit: Enable automatic hostname registration for Windows.

The magic tick box

In linux, DHCPCD does this by default. No extra points.

[1] http://rrr.thetruth.de/2010/06/would-mark-shuttleworth-use-gentoo-had-he- not-founded-ubuntu/ but I picked a better picture.
[2] Yes, meta-code starts at index zero. It leads you a cleaver zone file generator.
[3] I also need to find a better footnote system.