More DNS Notes

More DNS Notes - Secondary DNS Service - Linux

Jan 1997
How do I get someone else to do secondary DNS (Domain Name Service) for me?

The first thing you must do is to figure out who would be a good person to do secondary DNS for you. I would recommend a very competent ISP. We use geo.net and they are our ISP. They are pretty good.

Contact some ISP and ask about secondary DNS hosting. They will tell you what you need to do.

The last thing is that when you make updates to your DNS tables, you want your secondary DNS host to know about it. You accomplish this via the "Serial Number" contained in one of your named files.

My system is a Pentium running Linux 2.0 from Slackware

The first file is the named.boot file. This file will reference a bunch of other files. In my case I have told it that the file for the hosts of abc.com is named.abc.hosts. So when named boots up it will look at named.abc.hosts as well as named.xyz.hosts and the cache file named.ca

named.boot 
directory				/etc
primary		abc.com			named.abc.hosts
primary 	0.0.127.IN_ADDR.ARPA  	named.local
primary		xyz.com			named.xyz.hosts
cache		.			named.ca
The directory line just says where all these files are.

The first primary line is for the other hosts in my domain

The next file ...

named.abc.hosts 
@	IN	SOA	koko.abc.com.	mckenna.koko.abc.com (
			10118 		;	Serial
			43200		;	Refresh
			3600		;	Retry
			3600000		;	Expire
			2592000  )	;	Minimum
;	Define the nameservers and the mail servers
		IN	NS	koko.abc.com.
		IN 	MX	10 koko.abc.com.
		IN	A	207.90.132.170
;
;	Define localhost
;
localhost	IN	A	127.0.0.1
;
; 	Define the hosts in this zone
;
ftp		IN	A	207.90.132.170
www		IN	A	207.90.132.170
koko		IN	A	207.90.132.170
		IN	MX	5 koko.abc.com.
loghost		IN	CNAME	koko.abc.com.
The really key line, as far as your secondary DNS server(s) is concerned is the line that contains the key "Serial". This is your serial number and whenever you update this file, you should update your serial number so that the other DNS hosts will know that this file has been updated. If they detect a serial number HIGHER than the serial number the last time they update their files for you, they will refresh automatically.

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