Part 1 of (god knows how many, I don't know why, but I shouldn't decide to do stuff like this at 1am)

Crappy legal stuff: Copyright moi. Don't even consider holding me liable for anything that happens or doesn't happen by following this guide or anything else which might or might not happen when you are reading this howto.

e.g. If you are so engrossed in this guide and sitting in a chair with wheels when you push back and crush your cat and hear a very loud noise then swivel around to investigate it and in the process knock over a glass of some beverage you were consuming onto a already overloaded power extension and start a small electrical fire which then quickly spreads onto the giant magazine collection you have and sets fire to various other things in your room and eventually leads to the burning down of your house. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Also if you plan on publishing this somewhere else, it would be nice if you gave credit and left the entire article intact. So lets move onto the howto.

Due to multi platform madness I won't go into how to install bind (named) but you would be looking at doing one of the following commands

apt-get install bind9
yum install bind
rpm -ivh bind_package_name.rpm
emerge bind (Taking a stab at gentoo, never used it before)
./configure && make && make install (as root)


Depending on the package you've just installed, you could have a configuration that works mostly out of the box, or no configuration at all. I'll just assume you've got no configuration. You should be able to pick up later on.

Add a user which will not be used for anything else. This is a security thing so if someone does break/crack your DNS server, the damage they can do is limited.

You'll want to make a user now

adduser -h /var/named -s /bin/false named

The -h tells you where you want the home directory and the -s is what shell you want used for this account. We use /bin/false to stop anyone logging in.

And in part 2 we'll look at editing named.conf