Manage DNS Services

In previous posts, I shared instructions for setting up a Ubuntu LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) server and configuring Apache and mySQL to host new sites complete with phpmyadmin and cgi-bin access. I thought it would be useful to write a follow-up guide on setting up of an Ubuntu DNS (Domain Name Service) server on your LAN (local area network). For newcomers, DNS is a service that maps IP addresses to domain names (e.g., a public DNS server is responsible for mapping www.google.com to 74.125.19.103 and vise versa). There are several reasons why you may want to set up a private DNS server on you LAN. If your LAN includes more than a few machines, a private DNS server may be a more convenient way to map client host names to IP addresses then having to maintain a hosts configuration files on each client. A private DNS server can also help increase network performance by caching IP addresses of commonly visited websites instead of retrieving them from the public DNS servers maintained by ISPs at each request. This post describes how to set up a caching DNS server using BIND9 (Berkley Internet Naming Daemon Version 9), the most widely used DNS program and the DNS server that ships with Ubuntu. In a follow-up post I describe how to set up a master DNS server to serve DNS records for an imaginary domain (i.e., your LAN).

There are two ways to install BIND on Ubuntu. If you are performing a fresh installation of Ubuntu Server Edition (version 7.04 at time of writing) as per this post, at some point the install shell will ask if you wish to install a DNS and/or LAMP server. Select DNS (and LAMP if you so desire using the arrow keys and spacebar) and continue (using tab and enter). On the other hand, if you have already completed the installation of your LAMP server then use Ubuntu’s built in package management program aptitude to install BIND. Open a terminal and type.

By default, BIND installs on Ubuntu configured to act as a caching DNS server. However, you need to edit the configuration options file /etc/bind/named.conf.options to specify a public DNS server operating on the wide area network (WAN) to which un-cached domain names should be forwarded. Open this file with the text editor of your choice (I use vi here).

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