Using Bind to serve DNS information

Summary

The Lab maintains an authoritative DNS server (james), serving DNS data for three domains: ps.uni-saarland.de (the main domain, and the only one for which address-to-hostname lookups are supported), ps.uni-saarland.de(The legacy domain) and mozart-oz.org. The software for our DNS server is bind9; its configuration is in /etc/bind/named.conf.local. Only when adding ore removing a new stationary host should it be neccessary to change bind's configuration or any of the zone files.

Please note: If you just want to give network access to a guest's or student's laptop computer, please do not use bind. Instead, add the MAC address of the computer to the list of hosts with dynamic IP's in the /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf file on ofc, in the form:

• host <name> {

  • hardware ethernet <mac address>;

  • }

<name> does not have to match the hostname of the computer, it's just there to increase mantainability. Then run /etc/init.d/isc-dhcp-server restart.

Please note: If you update the db.ps.uni-saarland.de zone file, do not forget to also update the zone file for the inverse lookups, db.186.96.134.in-addr.arpa. You should not do this by hand, however---use the generate-reverse-zone-file script in /root/bin.