Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Running named

named (pronounced name-dee) provides DNS on most Unix machines. It is a server program originally developed for BSD to provide name service to clients, and possibly to other name servers. BIND Version 4 was around for some time and appeared in most Linux distributions. The new release, Version 8, has been introduced in most Linux distributions, and is a big change from previous versions.^[42] It has many new features, such as support for DNS dynamic updates, DNS change notifications, much improved performance, and a new configuration file syntax. Please check the documentation contained in the source distribution for details.

This section requires some understanding of the way DNS works. If the following discussion is all Greek to you, you may want to reread the section Section 6.2.”

named is usually started at system boot time and runs until the machine goes down again. Implementations of BIND prior to Version 8 take their information from a configuration file called /etc/named.boot and various files that map domain names to addresses. The latter are called zone files. Versions of BIND from Version 8 onwards use /etc/named.conf in place of /etc/named.boot.

To run named at the prompt, enter:

# /usr/sbin/named

named will come up and read the named.boot file and any zone files specified therein. It writes its process ID to /var/run/named.pid in ASCII, downloads any zone files from primary servers, if necessary, and starts listening on port 53 for DNS queries.