An Introduction to Managing DNS

DNS, or the Domain Name System, is an integral part of how the internet functions today. However, the way that DNS works is often quite mysterious for new administrators. In this guide, we will discuss some of the common terminology and concepts that are involved in DNS configuration.

DNS is a robust system that is absolutely essential in modern internet communication. Through a combination of delegation, redundancy, and caching, a client can receive the precise address of any of the system’s servers or sites by querying a complex network of computers for a simple name. In this article, we will discuss some of the different kinds of DNS servers that work together to make this possible. We will go over the advantages of each type and why you would choose one over another.

Bind is an extremely flexible DNS server that can be configured in many different ways. In this guide, we will discuss how to install Bind on an Ubuntu 14.04 server and configure it as either a caching or forwarding DNS server. Leveraging a DNS server configured like this can help speed up DNS queries for client computers.

Bind, the most popular DNS server, is used as the backbone of much of the world’s DNS system. In this guide, we will discuss how to configure a pair of DNS servers to act as primary and secondary authoritative-only DNS servers for your domains. We will be demonstrating this on Ubuntu 14.04.

In this tutorial, we will go over how to set up an internal DNS server, using the BIND name server software (BIND9) on Ubuntu 14.04, that can be used by your Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to resolve private host names and private IP addresses. This provides a central way to manage your internal hostnames and private IP addresses, which is indispensable when your environment expands to more than a few hosts.

NSD is an authoritative-only DNS server that is optimized to serve zone information quickly and efficiently. While some other DNS solutions provide value through their flexibility, NSD focuses on doing one task extremely well. In this guide, we will demonstrate how to configure NSD to authoritatively serve a domain on two servers in a primary-secondary configuration. We will be using Ubuntu 14.04 as the host system.