TCP/IP Network Administration, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Configuring DNS

Congratulations! You have installed TCP/IP in the kernel, configured the network interface, and configured routing. At this point, you have completed all of the configuration tasks required to run TCP/IP on a Unix system. While none of the remaining tasks is required for TCP/IP software to operate, they are necessary for making the network more friendly and useful. In the next two chapters, we look at how to configure basic TCP/IP network services. Perhaps the most important of these is name service.

It is, as the name implies, a service—specifically, a service intended to make the network more user-friendly. Computers are perfectly happy with IP addresses, but people prefer names. The importance of name service is indicated by the amount of coverage it has in this book. Chapter 3 discusses why name service is needed; this chapter covers how it is configured; and Appendix C covers the details of the name server configuration commands. This chapter provides sufficient information to show you how to configure the BIND software to run on your system.^[82] But if you want to know more about why something is done or details on how to do it, don’t hesitate to refer to Chapter 3 and Appendix C.

BIND: Unix Name Service

In Unix, DNS is implemented by the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) software. BIND is a client/server software system. The client side of BIND is called the resolver. It generates the queries for domain name information and sends them to the server. ...