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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Problems Running DNS on Ubuntu

Sorry I'm a bit late on this.  Catching up on my e-mail.

On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 11:41:50AM -0400, C.T. Paterson wrote:

> My addresses are served by a DHCP machine that is not a DNS,
> and that I can not change.  The addresses are predictable, though, so
> I'm content for them to statically entered in my DNS.

You may be interested in using 'dhclient', the Internet Systems
Consortium's DHCP client.  (In fact, they're the same group that
maintains 'bind'.)  It allows you to continue using DHCP normally, but
override (or append to, or prepend to) the options your DHCP server
sends you.

This is very handy for exactly this situation -- when a site assigns
you an arbitrary address, but you don't want to use the DNS server
they assign you.

> Attached are my named.conf.local and my zone files (mylan.local.db and
> the reverse lookup file for 192.168.1).

Unfortunately, it seems the mailing list must have scrubbed these
attachments, because I don't seem to have them on my end.

If you're still having trouble making this work, I could probably help
once I see the files themselves.  I run a BIND 9 server with over a
hundred working zones at a datacentre, so I'm pretty familiar with it.

> $ nslookup mylan-220 192.168.1.61
> Server:         192.168.1.61
> Address:        192.168.1.61#53

Have you actually defined 'mylan-220' as a top-level address (no
'.com' or whatnot), or is it running under a domain (e.g.
'mylan-220.example.com')?

If the latter, you should try testing with the fully-qualified domain
name (FQDN) first, i.e. mylan-220.example.com, to test the DNS server
directly.  Testing with just 'mylan-220' is simultaneously testing
your DNS server and your resolv.conf's 'search' line, and you should
only test one thing at a time.

Note that I typically prefer the 'host' utility to the 'nslookup'
utility, so long as it's the BIND9 version.  Example output:

	$ host www.google.com
	www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
	www.l.google.com has address 72.14.205.99
	www.l.google.com has address 72.14.205.103
	www.l.google.com has address 72.14.205.104
	www.l.google.com has address 72.14.205.147

	$ host google.com
	google.com has address 72.14.207.99
	google.com has address 64.233.167.99
	google.com has address 64.233.187.99
	google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp3.google.com.
	google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp4.google.com.
	google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp1.google.com.
	google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp2.google.com.

(There's also a different 'host' that gives less verbose output,
which I find less helpful in general.  For Debian, I use the
'bind9-host' package.)

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