10.4.4 Providing Domain Name Service – bind

If you need to provide authoritative name service for a domain then you need a fully fledged nameserver such as named which comes in the bind9 package.

If you install bind9 you should also install dnsutils. You may also want to install these utility packages: bind9-host; dns-browse; dnscvsutil; nslint. You may also want to install this documentation package: bind9-doc. You may also want to install these development packages: libbind-dev; libnet-dns-perl. If you configure interfaces using DHCP then you may find this package useful: dhcp-dns.

Install bind9 or dpkg-reconfigure it to do the basic set-up. Configuration consists of editing named.conf. In Debian this file is found in /etc/bind/ and is used mainly to define the basic DNS zones; it includes two other files: named.conf.local, used for defining local zones, and named.conf.options, used for setting options. (The latter is processed by resolvconf to produce /var/run/bind/named.options which is the same as the original except that the forwarders specification is a list of the currently available non-local nameservers. To make use of this, change the include line in named.conf so that it includes /var/run/bind/named.options. See Managing nameserver information – resolvconf, Section 10.4.2.)

Database files named in named.conf* without a full pathname will be stored in /var/cache/bind/. This is the right place to store files generated by named: for example, database files for zones for which the daemon is secondary. Static database files in /etc/bind/ are and must be referred to in named.conf by their full path names. See /usr/share/doc/bind9/README.Debian.gz for details.