Running DNS server on home network

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

http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/

"Bat Guano" <bat.guano@talk21dotcom> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...

>
> http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/
>

Cheers Bat, you also have helped me out :0)

On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 11:59:39 -0000, "BitsAndBobs"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>
>"Bat Guano" <bat.guano@talk21dotcom> wrote in message
>news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>
>>
>> http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/
>>
>
>Cheers Bat, you also have helped me out :0)
>

You'll find that

http://www.tinydns.org/

is a tad easier to setup than bind. Setting up Microsofts DNS server under
NT/Win2k as a pure caching server is also trivial to do.


greg


--
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The Following is a true story.....
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AWM wrote:

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 know next to nothing about dns but djbdns is supposed to be a lot
simpler than BIND. It's written by Dan Bernstein who also wrote qmail
and lots of other stuff. The site has some good general info as well.

url http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html

On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 11:41:29 UTC, "AWM" <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

> 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 run BIND on two machines locally. Not only for performance reasons,
but because I then have DNS for my local network even if the ADSL goes
down.

I run the primary and one secondary; my ISP provides (free) two more
secondaries, and they are the ones published to the world. So I don't
get a lot of outside traffic apart from reverse lookups (also delegated
by my ISP, free).

I use BIND; it's a bit heavyweight but works well. THE book to get is
the "DNS and BIND" Book from O'Reilly; it is a goldmine.

I used to run a lightweight local server that I wrote; it contained all
local DNS info and sent the rest to the ISP's server for resolution, if
the line was up. I discarded that when I got ADSL.
--
Bob Eager
rde at tavi.co.uk
PC Server 325*4; PS/2s 9585, 8595, 9595*2, 8580*3,
P70...

"AWM" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
news:bo2qh9$c5m$(E-Mail Removed):

> 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.

If you just want a cacheing DNS server you could look at dnsmasq for linux,
you need a couple of decent forwarders but it's about as simple to setup as
you can get, and it works well IME (using it as a resolver in our DMZ).

regards
Paul
--
paul <at> spamcop.net

"AWM" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:bo2qh9$c5m$(E-Mail Removed)...
> 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 ?


try bindPE from www.ntcanuck.com

self configuring )))

* AWM wrote:
> 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 is trivial to set up! A config file for a forwarding-only server is
tiny.

I admit to not having tried this, but I'm fairly sure something like:

options {
forwarders { ... };
forward only;
allow-query { localnets; };
};

in /etc/named.conf is enough, where `...' is a semicolon-separated
list of the IP addresses of the nameservers you want to forward to
(probably BTs).

You may also need a clause for the loopback zone, but I suspect you
don't even need that.

--tim

On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 12:27:13 +0000, Trevor <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>AWM wrote:
>
>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 know next to nothing about dns but djbdns is supposed to be a lot
>simpler than BIND.

There is nothing 'supposed' about that claim. Much easier to work on than
Bind. For anyone with unix knowledge, setting up dnscache will take less
than 10 mins to do.


greg
--
$ReplyAddress =~ s#\@.*$##; # Delete everything after the '@'
The Following is a true story.....
Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.