DNS Tutorial For Beginners | Hacker News Reader

DNS Tutorial For Beginners

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83 pointslouischatriot29 comments

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.

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

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.

well?

* sorry for being so obtuse I was just curious

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.

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...

3. http://serverfault.com/questions/301868/dns-entries-required...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Google's doc is bit more descriptive here.. https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...

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 :)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.".

You don't if you're running tinydns: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tinydns-data.html

Yes, unless you mean something different, here are articles about it: http://www.dns-sd.org/TrailingDotsInDomainNames.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20080326233315/http://homepages.t...

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

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

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

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.

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).

I'm one of those people who when I learn anything, I take hand written no matter what it is. I've even had language books tell me, " You probably won't need to do this" and I make sure to add it in anyway. And when that 1% time comes, my first reaction is always to the clear and detailed description that I myself wrote down. This has happened several times, ( a lot when I was getting my feet wet in server administration ). As someone who like to learn ot all no matter how out of context for the enviornment, I much prefer when stuff like this happens. I'd rather know how to do something as a just in case, then panic because I don't know something at all.

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