In our last tutorial we covered the basics of how to install and configure a LAMP stack running Linux, Apache HTTP server, MySQL, and PHP. Now what is the next step? In this next tutorial we will be learning how to set up and configure a DNS server. A DNS server is how we are going to manage internal domain names at home or in the office. For this tutorial we will be using the BIND9 service. First a little bit about how DNS Works, DNS stands for Domain Name Servers, this is a service running on the server which tells that www.google.com is located at IP address 74.125.239.18 (amongst a million others) if the DNS service cannot find address 74.125.239.18 on its DNS table it will begin querying other DNS services with a higher authority until it finds which DNS table holds the domain information for address 74.125.239.18. When it finds this information that is then passed to the users browser however in the event no internet connected DNS server is found with domain information for this address it will display a message in the users browser such as “Server not found”
When it comes to DNS configuration settings they can be very tricky. They can also be very difficult at times and we can go into depth about some more of the functions later so we want to create a private internal domain name “mydomain.com” so lets find out what our internal IP address is. Open your terminal and type ifconfig this will display a listing of all of our network connections. Now let’s assume our internal network address is 10.0.2.x (which is what mine is at the moment) and our router and gateway is 10.0.2.2 lets suppose all the devices on our network are going to be configured using static IP addresses (normally IP addresses are assigned automatically by DHCP but for the purpose of this tutorial we will have three static IP devices connected to our gateway.
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