DNS for machines in office?

This has to be a FAQ, but after an hour or so of looking, I'm still
stuck.

I have a very simple and very common network setup. I work in a small
office with 10-20 computers. They are all named after cities in the
US (New York, Miami, etc...). I want to be able to ping
miami.mydomain.com (or just miami) and have it ping the right machine
from any machine on the office network.

I'm going to designate one machine running fedora as a name server. I
assume somewhere I just need to have a list of names and ip's (like a
hosts file) that it can scan to do lookups and anything that it can't
handle, will just be sent to our ISP's name server. Am I right?

This seems like it should be easy to do, but for the life of me I
can't figure it out. Please help! This has to be exactly the situation
that most people are in, so specific instructions would be much
appreciated.

Thanks,
sc

On Wed, 05 May 2004 11:02:40 -0700, Steve Canfield wrote:
> I'm going to designate one machine running fedora as a name server. I
> assume somewhere I just need to have a list of names and ip's (like a
> hosts file) that it can scan to do lookups and anything that it can't
> handle, will just be sent to our ISP's name server. Am I right?

Nameservers are generally not that difficult ... just like everything
else in Unix, once you have a basic understanding, things are easy. I'm
familiar with 3 types of nameservers.

1. BIND: this is the standard. You set up 2 "zone files" in addition to
the samples which are probably installed along with the package (they
are in Slackware anyway) which provide external recursive resolution
and localhost/1.0.0.127.in-addr-arpa resolution.

Very powerful, likely overkill for a small setup, but hey, it's what I
use at home in a smaller setup.

2. djbdns: a suite including an authoritative nameserver (tinydns) and
a caching recursive resolver (dnscache). I'd say this is probably a bit
simpler to get going, but it's not standards-compliant, and does many
non-Unix things. I used to use this. I never did get to understand the
finer points of tinydns records. Rather than learn more about it I went
with BIND, and glad of it.

3. dnsmasq: the server's /etc/hosts file is served to local clients
through DNS, and DNS queries for external names are passed along to the
nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf. I have never used this, but I
wish I had heard of it when I originally set up djbdns! This sounds
like exactly what you need.

> This seems like it should be easy to do, but for the life of me I

I think that knowing where to look, it should be easy enough.

> can't figure it out. Please help! This has to be exactly the situation
> that most people are in, so specific instructions would be much

I don't do that, since each package provides its own documentation. But
I should warn you that both djbdns and BIND docs seemed, to me, to make
it sound more difficult than it really was.

Since I approached djbdns first with a much lower level of overall
understanding, this may be saying different things about each. I think
BIND lacks enough good samples, and some things are not explained as
well as they chould be IMO. But djbdns documentation seems downright
misleading.

That's all beside the point, as you're likely to look at dnsmasq first,
and if it's as simple as it seems, you'll never look elsewhere (unless
your needs change, of course.)
--
/dev/rob0 - preferred_email=i$((28*28+28))@softhome.net
or put "not-spam" or "/dev/rob0" in Subject header to reply

/dev/rob0 wrote:
> On Wed, 05 May 2004 11:02:40 -0700, Steve Canfield wrote:
>
>>I'm going to designate one machine running fedora as a name server. I
>>assume somewhere I just need to have a list of names and ip's (like a
>>hosts file) that it can scan to do lookups and anything that it can't
>>handle, will just be sent to our ISP's name server. Am I right?
>
>
> 3. dnsmasq: the server's /etc/hosts file is served to local clients
> through DNS, and DNS queries for external names are passed along to the
> nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf. I have never used this, but I
> wish I had heard of it when I originally set up djbdns! This sounds
> like exactly what you need.
>

My vote to dnsmasq. Here, it works like the proverbial charm
in a pretty similar setup. It knows to distribute the /etc/hosts
informatin of the gateway computer to all connected hosts, so
the name database is very simple to maintain. Just set up the
daemon and point the DNS server of all connected hosts to the
gateway.

Tauno Voipio
tauno voipio @ iki fi

"/dev/rob0" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message news:<(E-Mail Removed)>...
> On Wed, 05 May 2004 11:02:40 -0700, Steve Canfield wrote:
> > I'm going to designate one machine running fedora as a name server. I
> > assume somewhere I just need to have a list of names and ip's (like a
> > hosts file) that it can scan to do lookups and anything that it can't
> > handle, will just be sent to our ISP's name server. Am I right?
>
> Nameservers are generally not that difficult ... just like everything
> else in Unix, once you have a basic understanding, things are easy. I'm
> familiar with 3 types of nameservers.
>
[ stuff deleted ]
>
> 3. dnsmasq: the server's /etc/hosts file is served to local clients
> through DNS, and DNS queries for external names are passed along to the
> nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf. I have never used this, but I
> wish I had heard of it when I originally set up djbdns! This sounds
> like exactly what you need.

Thanks for the pointer. This is exactly what I was looking for. It
took me 5 minutes download, build the rpm, install, configure and
start dnsmasq. It's working perfectly!

-sc