When you have a server without any control panel, it becomes a pain in the arse to manage the services, especially the DNS service.
You have got the tedious job of installing bind, altering the configuration file, manually creating the zone files and so on.
Here are some tips which might help you :
— Navigate to your named.conf file and first make sure that your named service is set to listen to interfaces other than localhost alone.
The default setting which would come along in named.conf would be the following :
# listen-on port 53 { 127.0.0.1; };
# allow-query { 127.0.0.1; };
Change the above lines to :
# listen-on port 53 { any; };
# allow-query { any; };
If the service is allowed to bind to 127.0.0.1, external queries would not be replied back. Attempting to connect to port 53 from external hosts using tools such as telnet would result in a ‘connection refused’
You will only be able to resolve the zones internally. For eg,
dig @localhost domain.com would only work with named pinned to 127.0.0.1 alone
— To check if there are any errors associated with the named.conf file, run the following
# named-checkconf /path-to-named.conf
– Once the zones are created, you can check if they posses any configuration errors :
# named-checkzone IP /path-to-zone-file-to-be-checked
You may avail online zone file creators if you are not familiar with the syntax. Click here to create a zone file of your requirement.
Note on serial numbers :
When adding the serial number in a zone file, you must use the format — YYYYMMDDNN
NN stands for increment number starting from 01, whenever you edit the zone file increase its value by +1