This article will serve as an introduction to obtaining, installing, and configuring BIND under Linux, and will include some pointers on where to go for more in-depth information.

by Stew Benedict of CrossNodes, an EarthWeb site [May 8, 2001]

The Domain Name System (DNS) is used by all TCP/IP Internet software to translate the names that we humans like to use to the IP numbers assigned to all the computers and devices out on the Internet and your internal network.

Under most flavors of Unix, the most commonly used software package is Berkley Internet Name Domain, (BIND). This article will serve as an introduction to obtaining, installing, and configuring BIND under Linux, and will include some pointers on where to go for more in-depth information.

You should be aware that some recent security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in BIND, so be sure to get at least version 8.23. As of this writing, the latest version is 9.1.1. BIND can be downloaded from the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) at http://www.isc.org.

For the purposes of this article we'll use version 9.1.1, downloadable from ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/9.1.1/bind-9.1.1.tar.gz

ISC also offers support contracts for BIND as well as training, a mail list, and a FAQ. If you prefer printed documentation, O'Reilly has a good volume on DNS and Bind.

Installation
You can probably find binary RPMs to help install the program either on your distribution CDs, your distribution's Web site or at the Rpmfind.net Server.

If you are building from source, the build is fairly straightforward:

     tar -xzf bind-9.1.1.tar.gz
     cd bind-9.1.1
     ./configure
     make
     make install

     ./configure --help

Setup
After installing BIND, now you need to set it up. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to use an imaginary domain, stewb.net, which consists of two networks 192.168.192 and 192.168.193, with the primary server also acting as a router between the two.

BIND uses db, or zone files, similar to the /etc/hosts file you may be familiar with on a unix system. The hosts file looks something like this, and it maps IP addresses to domain names:

     192.168.192.1      moe.stewb.net        moe
     192.168.193.1      moe.stewb.net        moe
     192.168.192.2      larry.stewb.net      larry
     192.168.193.40     omniw.stewb.net      omniw
     192.168.192.20     pserver.stewb.net    pserver
     192.168.192.45     powerbook.stewb.net  powerbook

1: Introduction	3: Configuration
>2: The Zone Files	4: Conclusion