Running DNS server on home LAN

For business reasons I am stuck with BT for the next few months until my
quiet spell early in the spring when I can afford the ADSL downtime that
might be caused by migration.
Like many others I am frustrated by BT's servers as a result I have been
using software which converts frequenly used URLs into numeric IP addresses
and adds them to the hosts file on my PC, I have been surprised by the
resultant performance improvement and I am now thinking of adding a DNS
server on my LAN either running on an NT4 Workstation or a Mandrake Linux
PC. Apart from BIND which looks truly horrendous to setup I only have found
acouple of shareware DNS servers Raiden DNS and Simple Dns Plus.

Has anybody in the group done this and want to share thier experience ?

AWM wrote:
> For business reasons I am stuck with BT for the next few months until my
> quiet spell early in the spring when I can afford the ADSL downtime that
> might be caused by migration.
> Like many others I am frustrated by BT's servers as a result I have been
> using software which converts frequenly used URLs into numeric IP addresses
> and adds them to the hosts file on my PC, I have been surprised by the
> resultant performance improvement and I am now thinking of adding a DNS
> server on my LAN either running on an NT4 Workstation or a Mandrake Linux
> PC. Apart from BIND which looks truly horrendous to setup I only have found
> acouple of shareware DNS servers Raiden DNS and Simple Dns Plus.

Bind isn't really that difficult. It is big and complex but there is no
need to use most of its features for a simple caching nameserver. Your
Mandrake system comes with bind and may even come with a complete
caching nameserver configuration you can install.

If it doesn't, chapter 3 of the DNS howto at
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html describes settting one
up clearly and simply.

An alternative to bind is http://djbdns.org/. Some consider it simpler
but I have no experience of it.

You can run bind on Windows but I don't recommend it if you have a Linux
system around. Microsoft's DNS server only comes with the server
versions of NT and 2K I believe. It's not worth paying for them just to
get a DNS server. It is very easy to set up if you do happen to have one
of them though.

Regards, Ian

On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 11:54:41 +0000, AWM wrote:

> For business reasons I am stuck with BT for the next few months until my
> quiet spell early in the spring when I can afford the ADSL downtime that
> might be caused by migration.
> Like many others I am frustrated by BT's servers as a result I have been
> using software which converts frequenly used URLs into numeric IP
> addresses and adds them to the hosts file on my PC, I have been surprised
> by the resultant performance improvement and I am now thinking of adding a
> DNS server on my LAN either running on an NT4 Workstation or a Mandrake
> Linux PC. Apart from BIND which looks truly horrendous to setup I only
> have found acouple of shareware DNS servers Raiden DNS and Simple Dns
> Plus.
>
> Has anybody in the group done this and want to share thier experience ?

I use DNSmasq running on RedHat, but it will run OK on Mandrake.
Installation and setup is a breeze. It gives you a fully working DNS proxy
in a few minutes. I kid you not.

Take a look at http://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

graham

Graham wrote:

> I use DNSmasq running on RedHat, but it will run OK on Mandrake.
> Installation and setup is a breeze. It gives you a fully working DNS proxy
> in a few minutes. I kid you not.
>
> Take a look at http://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

Note that that's just a caching proxy, it still needs the ISP
nameservers to provide the answers in the first place. It'll speed
things up if you look the same names up a lot, but it won't help at all
if you look up different ones all the time.

A proper local caching nameserver provides that without the reliance on
the ISP nameservers.

Regards, Ian

It has been a worthwhile topic last night I loaded Simple DNS on the the NT4
box running as a service, the results are quite impressive particularly
handy in view of the fact that most of BT Internets's DNS servers appear to
be down for current status see http://www.btofaq.net/articles/sstatus1.html
if you want a good reason not to get BT broadband.