CNT5605 - 2012 Fall
Assignment 7
Due Thursday, November 8

Assignment: DNS server




Your objective is to set up a local DNS server on your Debian machine. You can choose whichever package you like to do this.

There are tradeoffs associated with using any software packages. Please examine a few of the candidates below before installing anything, and write out your initial reasoning as to your initial installation decisions.

Some are some major considerations that I would suggest (also, I suggest looking at chapter 17 in the ULSAH book):

  1. DJBDNS: (a) DJBDNS is not likely to be in a repository, and is usually installed from source, so it is clearly more challenging as an installation project. (b) Documentation for DJBDNS is fairly scarce except for the CR.YP.TO website. (c) DJBDNS is considered by most sysadmins to be very easy to configure, and maintenance is usually a breeze.
  2. BIND: (a) BIND is by far the most common DNS package and is trivial to install. (b) It is heavily documented, and there are numerous books available on the sole subject of configuring this daemon. (c) Hand maintenance of BIND files is historically a troublesome and tedious task. (d) There are GUI interfaces available to configure DNS, such as webmin.
  3. MaraDNS: (a) MaraDNS can be found in your software repositories. (b) Like DJBDNS, documentation is quite scarce except for the documentation at the http://www.maradns.org website. (c) MaraDNS is also considered by most of its users to be quite simple to configure and maintain, with the nice ability to synthesize certain tedious but necessary records.
  4. DNSMASQ: (a) DNSMASQ can be found in your software repositories. (b) Like DJBDNS, documentation is quite scarce. (c) DNSMASQ is quite popular for its easy configuration and for its strong DHCP integration.

Test your server's recursion by asking for different records (such as some of those in the DNS notes): ibm.com's SPF TXT record, etc. For now, recursion is sufficient, but bear in mind that in future assignments you will have to add records that your Debian machine will be authoritative for.


No journal is due for this assignment.