Hello All:

Thankyou for all of your responses. I have separated my questions to avoid
confusion.

"Cathryn L. Kliegel" wrote

> 2) DNS. I had a simple system up with resolv.conf and it worked. I tried
> to setup DNS and it killed my system. Turned it off and it worked. Am
> looking into this.

To be more clear on this issue:

The system I am trying to setup is

    MacIIsi / 64MB RAM / internal video / 2G disk / 10Mb ethernet 16K / DSL
modem on 10Mb ethernet
    PacBell DSL with 5 static IP addresses (X.X.X.194, X.X.X.195,
X.X.X.196, X.X.X.197, X.X.X.198)
    NetBSD 1.5.3
    A domain name from register.com

So using /etc/ifconfig.ae0 I set my Mac's ae0 IP address to X.X.X.194. I
also set the domain name I got from register.com to point to
X.X.X.194. I used route to set up a static routing table to point to the
ae0/DSL gateway (X.X.X.193). And I used resolve.conf
to point BIND to X.X.X.194, PacBell DNS server 1, and PacBell DNS server 2,
in that order.

With that configuration I can browse the web (via lynx), run ssh and login
remotely, use sup, ping network hosts, ping my
MacIIsi from the net, etc. This seems to me to be alive.

I have two motivations for setting up a DNS server on my Mac: 1) to serve
my domain (I want eventally to install my 10/100Mb switch and other
computers on this domain) and 2) to run sendmail which seems to want to
lookup a mailhost from a local DNS server.

So I followed the ORielly TCP/IP Network Administration DNS chapter to
setup a master server, edited the requisite four
files, and turned on named in the /etc/rc.conf. The system booted and could
be used locally but none of the above signs of life worked. When I turned
named back off in /etc/rc.conf the network was alive again.

To me this means that I hosed up my local DNS server and when named was on
BIND/resolve.conf pointed to the local server first and never recovered.
When named was off BIND/resolve.conf pointed to the local server first,
could not find it, and so went to the PacBell servers which presumably are
working fine.

So how do I debug my local DNS server? Do I need to register a reverse DNS
lookup for this to work? Should I buy the O'Reilly DNS/BIND book? What
tools can I use to probe my server and see what it thinks is going on?

Thanks

James