DNS Server basic setup

The objective is to set up a name server on a Ubuntu server that serves some domains to the Internet. The domains being served are too complex to be managed by the provider of the domain name, as a result they are being hosted on a home server on a dynamic IP.

The environment is Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Desktop freshly installed and updates done.

In the process of offloading as much DNS responsibility as possible to external services I found that MX and CNAME records clash, so if there are MX records for a domain, then the top of the domain should not have a CNAME record, so I used an A record that points at the yi.org url redirector server, in the future I may actually update the A record dynamically.

Given that, the following is the minimal steps required to configure the name server.

install the name server software:

sudo apt-get install bind9

Set up the zone file, the top level records should include the top level records that are also provided by the external services.
/etc/bind/db.happy.yi.org:

$TTL 604800
@ 3600 IN SOA happy.yi.org. happy.happy.yi.org. (
 2011011601 ; serial
 604800 ; refresh
 86400 ; retry
 2419200 ; expire
 3600 ) ; default ttl
@ 86400 IN NS sunriseyoga.dyndns.org.
@ 3600 IN A 173.203.238.64
@ 86400 IN MX 10 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
@ 86400 IN MX 20 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
www 86400 IN CNAME sunriseyoga.dyndns.org.
vnc 86400 IN CNAME sunriseyoga.dyndns.org.
mail 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
pages 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
docs 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
sites 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
site 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
app 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
blog 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.
feather-wiki 86400 CNAME ghs.google.com.

tell the name server to load the zone by adding the following line to /etc/bind/named.conf.local:

zone "happy.yi.org" { type master; file "/etc/bind/db.happy.yi.org"; };

reload the name server

sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 reload

now the domain is being served, and will be accessible from the Internet if the NS records point at the server.

If you want to know more, read the Ubuntu BIND9 Server HOWTO.