# Standalone DNS



## freebei (Feb 7, 2012)

Hi all,

I am new to FreeBSD. We want to set up a simple server farm for our hosting project. We are thinking of using FreeBSD on our servers. We thought that using standalone DNS may be better in our project. We are planning to use around 10 virtual servers where 2 of them are going to be our DNS machines. Is it possible to use FreeBSD as standalone DNS solution? Is it feasible to use standalone DNS?

Thanks.


----------



## SirDice (Feb 7, 2012)

freebei said:
			
		

> Is it possible to use FreeBSD as standalone DNS solution ?
> Is it feasible to use standalone DNS ?


Yes and yes. You don't even need to install anything as BIND is part of the base OS.


----------



## freebei (Feb 7, 2012)

Thank you very much for your fast reply.

Do we need to configure our additional servers to meet this configuration? Let's say is it needed or possible to force update from our hosting machines? Or are we going to manually process our DNS records on both our hosting servers and DNS machines? Our intention is to create ns1 and ns2 machines. We will be storing all DNS records on these machines while providing hosting services from our other servers.

So is it possible to solve DNS data integrity? Is it possible to push new records from other servers or do we have to manually edit DNS records?

Thanks


----------



## hockey97 (Feb 7, 2012)

Do you guys own your own domain name?


----------



## J65nko (Feb 7, 2012)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_zone_transfer



> DNS zone transfer, also sometimes known by its (most common) opcode mnemonic AXFR, is a type of DNS transaction. It is one of the many mechanisms available for administrators to employ for replicating the databases containing the DNS data across a set of DNS servers. Zone transfer comes in two flavors, full (opcode AXFR) and incremental (IXFR). Nearly universal at one time, it is now becoming less popular in favor of the use of other database replication mechanisms that modern DNS server packages provide.



So if you edit the DNS data on nameserver 1 (ns1) it can be replicated easily to the ns2 name server.


----------



## throAU (Feb 8, 2012)

Sounds like you need to read up on DNS/BIND.

FreeBSD can do what you ask, however the how-to aspect of zone updates, etc is a BIND configuration query, not necessarily related to FreeBSD.

The basic theory is you have 1 primary name-server and N slaves.  The zones are edited on the primary and pushed/pulled to/from the slaves.

Once you've read up on how DNS works, there is a DNS section in the FreeBSD handbook for FreeBSD implementation specifics.


----------



## freebei (Feb 8, 2012)

First of all, thank you for the replies.

hockey97; yes we own the domain where we are going to use as our ns1.example.com and ns2.example.com.

J65nko, throAU; we will be using DNS machines for only serving DNS data but our client domains, projects and data will be stored in different machines. So when we add a domain or service to for example server #4 we need to update the DNS records in our ns1 and ns2 machines, right? 

From what *I* understand from the documents, it will be possible to use hosting machines to push their newly created DNS records to our main DNS machines. We need to configure push mechanism in hosting machines and we need to configure our ns1/ns2 machines to serve our DNS records.

Is it true?

What if we use popular panel softwares like cpanel or directadmin? Can we create a centralized DNS architecture as *I* mentioned?

Thanks


----------



## DutchDaemon (Feb 9, 2012)

As was mentioned before: none of these questions are in any way FreeBSD-related: BIND is used on almost every platform. Get a good BIND book (like O'Reilly's "DNS and BIND"), read ISC's documentation (http://www.isc.org/software/bind), and start reading up on how DNS works, and how DNS servers interact. The final implementation can be done using FreeBSD's own implementation and documentation of BIND (which is also very standard). This forum is really not the place to ask for something that's already available in great detail elsewhere.


----------



## throAU (Feb 9, 2012)

freebei said:
			
		

> J65nko, throAU; we will be using DNS machines for only serving DNS data but our client domains, projects and data will be stored in different machines. So when we add a domain or service to for example server #4 we need to update the DNS records in our ns1 and ns2 machines, right?



No, you update the zones on your primary, and the slaves replicate from it.

You will, however need to configure the slaves to tell them which zones to update, and what the primary NS is for each zone you host.  That's a one-off for each zone you host.



> What if we use popular panel softwares like cpanel or directadmin? Can we create a centralized DNS architecture as *I* mentioned?
> 
> Thanks



The method you use to configure BIND is pretty irrelevant, you still need to configure it to have a primary and N slaves per zone.

You really need to learn how BIND works; without this, whether or not you are using cpanel or your text editor of choice to edit your zones, garbage in = garbage out to the internet for your DNS (with the possible side-effect of breaking mail, web hosting, etc). 

I'd start here:
http://www.bind9.net/manuals


----------

