BIND: a DNS server

BIND is an excellent, high quality DNS server. Its configuration is complex though.

Documentation Resources

I've found the official documentation not very useful or clear. The following links are better:

• Setup a DNS server with BIND (Gentoo Wiki)
• DNS for Rocket Scientists, excellent documentation

There is also a book by Apress, Pro DNS and BIND, that can be useful.

General DNS facts

• There is no DNS cache on Linux at the OS level (libc *might* cache stuff).

Basics

• There is a main configuration file (/etc/bind/named.conf) that references zones for which the DNS daemon assumes responsibility. I think it is important to first understand what types of services a DNS server can perform: primary, secondary, cache, forward.

• There is a separate file for each such zone, that actually contains the record entries.

DNS Round Robin

• DNS round robin is pretty easy to setup on BIND. Note that the DNS server returns the full array of IPs for a given host; after it is up to the client to make a choice. Consider client behavior undefined. Some programs such as wget will try a different IP than the first on failure, but this behavior is really client dependent.