Michael G. Schabert <mikeride@mac.com> wrote

[snip]

>>  The whole reason I want to set up a DNS is that I want it to be 
>>able to tell ANY computer a name for itself or other computers.
>>Everytime I ask you just put up a wall and say 'don't go there'.Well 
>>my friend managed it in Linux so I can do it too. So tell me - is 
>>there any info on it around or am I just going to go on asking until 
>>I go blue?
>
>I have my home network set up with /etc/hosts files  that assigns two 
>shortcut names to each computer. 192.168.1.1 is my alpha, so its 
>shortcut names are "prez" and "alpha". .2 is my Q840AV, so it gets 
>"mac" and "quadra". .3 is an LC575 belonging to my daughter Veronica, 
>so it gets "ronnie" and "lc". .4 is a PowerMac 7200/90, so it gets 
>"power" and "ppc". "telnet mac:4000" is perfectly valid with this 
>setup.

Hmmm... can I ask why you gave each machine two names?
Neither appear to be dual homed... ?

>As I mentioned, the files for named will be written exactly the same, 
>whether on Linux or NetBSD...so why don't you go ask your friend to 
>see his files?
>
>You will want them to be in /etc/namedb/master.
>
>The biggest drawback that I can see WRT using named is that it only 
>wants to deal with actual domain names...i.e. it wants more than just 
>"pentium" or "quadra" as the computer's name. It wants 
>machine.domain.TLD. While using your computers, you would be able to 
>leave off the domain.TLD, if you have the "search domain" or "default 
>domain" filled out in your configs...but the computer will be 
>resolving the whole domain. This may seem trivial, as you can just 
>make up a trivial domain....however, there will always be the 
>possibility that there is truly a domain with that designation. Then, 
>if you were to try to go there, you wouldn't be able to.

Yes.  And, depending on your ISP, if that bogus domain name
starts appearing in the envelope of your outbound email, your
ISP's mail server may decide to reject mail from you (been
there, done that, got the T-shirt to prove it...)

>Here's a sample /etc/namedb/master/foo.org
>
>=====
>$ORIGIN foo.org.
>$TTL    86400
>@ IN SOA foo.org. root.foo.org. (
>                         01123101 ; Serial number: yymmdd[0-9][0-9]
>                         3600 ; Refresh in secs (every 1 hours)
>                         3600 ; Retry in secs (every hour)
>                         432000 ; Expire in secs (every 5 days)
>                         86400) ; Minimum in secs (24 hours)
>
>         IN NS lc.foo.org. ;internal name server
>         IN MX 10 mail.foo.org. ;where mail should go
>
>localhost IN A 127.0.0.1 ; loopback address
>foo.org. IN A 192.168.1.1
>lc IN CNAME foo.org.

Note that CNAMEs can be a problem with some tools.

>laptop IN A 192.168.1.2
>osx IN CNAME laptop
>windows IN A 192.168.1.3
>pentium IN CNAME windows
>=====
>
>As you don't own any real domains, your changes should not propogate 
>outside your network, so you can't cause any harm to the "real" 

Note also the mail issue....

>Internet...just your own LAN. If you ever have any issues with your 
>ISP or anything else, the first step you should take is to turn off 
>your name server & point your machines to your ISP's server, before 
>blaming any network problems of the ISP.
>
>>If it's any motivation the very existence of my LCIII depends on this....
>
>Hehe, I'll take it if you're done with it :P


Yeah, it would look great on the back of your *bike*!!  :>

--don