
DNS Tutorial For Beginners - louischatriot
http://needforair.com/blog/2012/04/22/dns-redirections/
======
jbarham
IMO here's a better tutorial by D. J. Bernstein:
<http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/intro-dns.html> (although the "record" syntax is for
his own tinydns server vs. BIND's zone files).

But if you care about security, you probably don't want to be running BIND
given its long history of bugs and security holes.

Here's BIND's security advisory page: <http://www.isc.org/advisories>. By
contrast only a _single_ security hole has ever been discovered in the djbdns
suite: <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.djbdns/13864>. DJB has a well
earned reputation for being abrasive, but his proven track record for writing
secure software is unmatched.

Full disclosure: I'm developing a DNS hosting service (<http://slickdns.com>)
and needless to say I do not use BIND.

~~~
daemon13
thanks for the link to DJB - this is gold :-)

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troels
That started out promising, but ended up a bit disappointing. Editing the zone
file seems like the _least_ interesting part of this topic.

How about explaining the relationship between dns, registrars, soa records, ns
servers etc.? This is where things get really hard to understand due to all
those levels of indirection going on.

~~~
echo-unity
well?

* sorry for being so obtuse I was just curious

~~~
troels
Ah, you mean you'd like an explanation of those concepts? Well, I think I more
or less understand the details by now, but it would take some effort to put it
all into words. I'm afraid I don't quite have the time for that at the moment,
so this was more meant as a suggestion for the author of the article to look
into.

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daemon13
Why reinvent the wheel? Spend time on smth of greater value.

There are a lot of good resources on beginner matters. So use existing
resources:-

1\. <http://library.linode.com/dns-guides/introduction-to-dns>

2\. [http://library.linode.com/dns-guides/configuring-dns-with-
th...](http://library.linode.com/dns-guides/configuring-dns-with-the-linode-
manager)

3\. [http://serverfault.com/questions/301868/dns-entries-
required...](http://serverfault.com/questions/301868/dns-entries-required-to-
get-test-example-com-to-respond-to-pinging)

4\. Registering a GoDaddy domain name and point it to linode.
<http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4226%3E>

I have not seen a good, easy to understand tutorial to get me from
beginner/mid-level to high level understanding [not even speaking about
mastery] of DNS. Spending time on such tutorial and sharing it would be much
appreciated.

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alexchamberlain
Sorry, but this was rather disappointing. Most registrars do not allow you to
edit zone files, but rather provide a GUI. Of course, you could host your DNS
yourself, but you don't want to do that or use an alternative DNS host, which
probably provides a different GUI.

It is important for a beginner to understand what an A record or a CNAME
record is, rather than how bind(?) is configured.

~~~
louischatriot
Our registrar (gandi.net) allows us to edit the zone file, something I find
much simpler than most GUIs out there.

~~~
alexchamberlain
So, this is a guide for Gandi then, not DNS.

~~~
mrvir
No, it's about DNS resource records generally used by all name servers (RFC
1035).

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clyfe
If you find zonefiles a hassle might want to use <http://www.entrydns.net> a
free service I'm building with a sysadimn friend, it has nice GUI interface to
manage most DNS needs.

~~~
alexchamberlain
Your SSL certificate is not trusted on my Asus Transformer Prime - Android
ICS.

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centosh
Google's doc is bit more descriptive here..
[https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...](https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48090#A)

~~~
louischatriot
That's true, I should have been clearer in my introduction: this really is a
guide for beginners. The goal here was to show a simple zone file example and
go through it, so that someone who never set up a DNS could do it in 10
minutes. That's why it is nowhere as complete as Google's description :)

~~~
X-Istence
Except someone who has never done it before probably shouldn't be in the
position to edit zone files themselves... They should most likely use their
registrars DNS servers or the DNS servers for their host, or if they want to
get fancy one of the DNS providers out there.

Once you get to the point that you have outgrown the solutions out there, or
you want to do something fancy such as create records on the fly then you can
start looking into doing your own DNS hosting.

~~~
louischatriot
I agree with you that if you want to be a full-fledged programmer you will
need to understand this topic beyond this simple example, but at the time I
really could have used it as a starting point.

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pajju
<http://continuations.com/post/16405180072/tech-tuesday-dns> is more
descriptive.

~~~
czzarr
it's not the same thing. Wenger doesn't explain how to use zone files. We do
link to his post at the end of ours

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ParadisoShlee_
This is the worst tutorial I've seen in a long time.

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greggman
This is probably a stupid question but is there a good reason you must have a
period at the end of the name?

~~~
ez77
I think it becomes a relative path without the final/root dot. That is,
"example.net" in the zone file "mydomain.com" will be understood as
"example.net.mydomain.com.".

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heliosj228
This hostname to IP translation thing is really going to take off, I can just
feel it!

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ponyous
Really today? Yesterday I was searching for article like this.

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kirchhoff
Beginners probably won't need to directly edit a zone file.

~~~
louischatriot
It does seem paradoxical, but I know quite a few people I consider to be good
coders, but know almost nothing about DNS. For example, a former researcher in
CS who now wants to launch his webstartup.

~~~
corin_
Right, but they probably won't need to edit zone files directly, unless for
some reason they chose to host their own DNS servers (why would they).

