Linux Server Security, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Chapter 6: Securing Domain Name Services (DNS)

axfrdns

Transfers zone data from a primary tinydns nameserver to a secondary

nameserver, such as BIND.

axfr-get

Requests zone-data transfers from a primary nameserver such as BIND to a sec-

ondary tinydns nameserver.

The separation of these functions in djbdns requires you to decide what name ser-

vices you want to provide and where. Here’s a guide for the most common situa-

tions:

• If you have one Unix machine and you only want to provide caching name ser-

vices to local client programs, install an internal DNS cache with dnscache.

• If you have multiple machines, you can install an internal DNS cache with

dnscache on each machine or an external DNS cache on one machine (dnscachex)

to serve its neighbors.

• If you manage some domains and want to provide lookup services to these for

the Internet, install the authoritative DNS server, tinydns.

• If you manage some domains and want redundancy, install tinydns on more than

one server and transfer data among them with rsync and ssh.

• If you install tinydns but also need to transfer zone data to BIND (with tinydns as

a primary or master server), install axfrdns.

• If you install tinydns but also need to accept zone data from BIND (with tinydns

as a secondary or slave server), install axfr-get ...