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This thrilling saga was written by a Speakeasy customer who is now running a primary name server. It is an account of what needed to be done to get this working, offered in the hope that it will help the next one down this path to avoid some of the blind allies. It's not complete, but somebody asked me a question, so I put it here half done.

There is no reason to re-write the many books, RFC's, and software documents that explain the DNS system, so I concentrate on things that are specific to the Speakeasy environment and so are not covered in more generic publications.

To run a primary name server with Speakeasy running the secondaries, you must do the following:

Prepare your mind.
Have a computer running a DNS server that will be online at all times; 24x7 as they say.
Choose and register a domain name.
Register the IP address of your primary domain name server.
Get Speakeasy to set the Reverse DNS entry for the IP address of your name server to point back to the name of your server.
Configure your name server to allow zone transfers to Speakeasy's Secondary servers.
Get Speakeasy to configure their secondary name servers to fetch the zone file for your domain from your primary name server.

Prepare your mind

Know why you want to do this. It could be a lot of trouble, why not let Speakeasy run all the nameservers? Possible reasons include

You have a many machines in your domain and the names are constantly changing.
You want to learn how it works.

In either case, you need to read about DNS. The definitive references are

RFC-1034 - Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities
RFC-1035 - Domain Names - Implementation and Specification

There are several software packages that implement those RFCs;

tinydns

and

djbdns

are two that I know little about, but you might like. I used the old standby, the Berkley Internet Name Daemon (BIND). The standard reference is:

DNS and BIND by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu

Although that is nominally up-to-date in the fourth edition, you might prefer the newer

Pro DNS and BIND by Ron Aitchison

or just look at the BIND Manual on the web. If you just wanted to know how it works, you may feel smart enough after all that reading. If not, you must go on to the next step.

Keep a DNS server running

You need to get the DNS server software or your choice, and install it on a computer that is always (well, almost always) connected to the internet at a fixed IP address. You can't run DNS on a machine that gets its address through DHCP.

Authoritative - an NS is authoritative for a domain if it has complete information about a domain
- Primary - a Primary NS (for a given zone) is an authoritative NS that gets its data from a file.
- Secondary - a Secondary NS is an authoritative NS that gets its data from an authoritative primary NS. It does this by a special "Zone Transfer" query.
recursive or caching -

Choose and register a domain name

If your new domain is to be "coolstuff.foo.bar.baz", then you must tell the people in charge of the domain "foo.bar.baz" what you are doing. When a name server that does not have any information cached from previous queries trys to find out about coolstuff.foo.bar.baz it starts by asking the root names servers about the name server for the top level domain "baz" When you register a domain name with the owner of the parent domain you must supply the names of two authoritative name servers for the new domain.

Register the IP address of your Primary DNS

It is not enough for the parent domain to have the names of your name servers, because there is nowhere to look up those names yet. The parent name server must also have the IP address of your name servers. If you use someone else's servers that is already set up, but to register your own name server you must give your parent this information. For example, if GoDaddy is your registrar, log on and select "Manage Domains" from the "Domain Names" menu and go to your domain name, then choose "Domain Host Summary" and "Click here to see details or to modify". This brings up a form to enter the name and IP address.

Have Speakeasy set the Reverse DNS record for your server

Allow Zone transfers to the Secondary Servers

Have Speakeasy's Secondary Servers fetch your zone

(checked 2007-07-10)

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