Free Web Hosting by Netfirms
Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

1. Open the resolv.conf file which is in /etc and set the following values

Search <name of the domain>
nameserver <IP Address of the Local Machine>

2. Open named.conf file which is in /etc and specify as zone as follows

zone "genesiis.com" {

type master;
notify no;
file "genesiis.com";

};

Note – The file command specifies the zone file to refer to this specific domain and it should be created manually in /var/named/ folder

The zone name must be the same as the domain name which you specify in the Search line in resolv.conf. If there are many domains to be hosted several zone files can be created and those domain names must be added to resolv.conf file with spaces between two domain names.


3. When the above process is completed open named.conf file in /var/named and perform the following

• Create a file with the exact name which was specified in named.conf file

• Add the following text to the beginning of the file. (This is only for test use)

$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA ns.genesiis.com. administrator.genesiis.com. (
20030603 ; Serial
28800 ; Refresh
14400 ; Retry
3600000 ; Expire
86400 ) ; Minimum
IN NS ns.genesiis.com
IN MX 10 mail.genesiis.com

1 IN PTR ns.genesiis.com

ns A 127.0.0.1

neptune A 100.100.100.67

mail cname neptune.mositha.com

g7788 A 100.100.100.23


Following will describe in detail about each line in the above zone file

• TTL - Time To Live, if this is omitted, then bind will issue a warning and use the minimum TTL from the SOA record

• SOA - The machine which is the primary name server (ns.mositha.com) and a mail alias to the sysadmin responsible for this server, note that the @ is removed and a period is used

• Serial - You will want to increment this every time you make a modification to the record so the secondary or any other inquiring dns server will know if changes have been made to the zone. Standard format is YYYYMMDDXX - Year/Month/Day/Increment

• NS - this is the server, or servers that are authorities for this record. Note that any record that is a name must end in a period,

• MX - The next line is the MX record, this is the mail exchanger for this record. Lower the number of the MX record the higher priority the particular mail server has for receiving mail

• PTR - PTR (Domain Name Pointer) record says that the host at address 1 in the subnet 0.0.127.in-addr.arpa, i.e., 127.0.0.1 is named ns.genesiis.com

• A – A records specifies the address of a host

• CNAME – CNAME (Canonical NAME) is a way to give each machine several names. In the above file mail will be a alias for neptune.genesiis.com


4. If your DNS is configured to cache external domains the DNS has to be maintained regularly in order to update the DNS cache. The maintenance of the DNS is explained in the following document.

Maintaining_a_DNS_Server.doc
Troubleshooting

To test your setting you can use nslookup or dig utilities to query the DNS server which was just configured. Following is an example of nslookup output for a DNS server which has the above mentioned configuration.

[root@mars named]# nslookup g7788.genesiis.com

Server: 100.100.100.69
Address: 100.100.100.69#53

Name: g7788.genesiis.com
Address: 100.100.100.23