NOTE THAT MOST ALL OF THE DNS INFORMATION ON THIS WIKI PAGE IS HIGHLY OUT-OF-DATE AND MOSTLY ONLY OF HISTORICAL INTEREST. IT MOSTLY HARKENS BACK TO A TIME WHEN MULTIPLE DISTINCT DNS SERVERS WERE RUNNING ON THE SAME HOST, TO SERVER SEPARATE NEEDS OF VARIOUS [L]UGs, E.G. BALUG, "vs." SF-LUG, etc.

The care and feeding of the BALUG DNS server.

• The BALUG DNS server should not interfere with other DNS service(s) or other non-BALUG services on the host (and vice versa)
• To avoid accidentally shutting down, signaling, etc. the incorrect DNS server, use the proper -balug commands/pathnames/scripts, e.g. for most normal operations one should only need to use:
  • /etc/rc.d/init.d/named-balug (with relevant argument(s))
  • /usr/local/sbin/*-balug* (but the above should generally be used instead)
  • FAILURE TO USE THE COMMANDS NOTED ABOVE MAY CLOBBER THE WRONG DNS SERVER
• Along those non-interference regards:
  • the BALUG DNS server should (generally) only use its designated IP address(es) - see: IP Addresses
  • it should not listen on other IPs (most notably for DNS)
  • the one exception so far, is it does listen for control (rndc) connection on a non-default port on 127.0.0.1 - again, do use the appropriate -balug commands to avoid accidentally operating on the incorrect DNS server.
• The BALUG DNS server runs using user:group balugdns:balugdns. Note that for security reasons, to the extent feasible (and as appropriate), user balugdns and group balugdns should not have access to alter any content on the host or have any special privileges on the host. Note that it may be permissible for user balugdns or group balugdns to alter some files where that is explicitly desired (e.g. PID files, statistics dump files, cache dump files, slave files). Note also that in general, user balugdns or group balugdns needs read access to master zone files to be served (generally read access on files, and read and "execute"(/search) on directories and ancestor directories).
• in general, only superuser (UID 0, a.k.a. "root") should be able to alter BALUG DNS files (most notably master zone files). The BALUG DNS (running in chroot environment, with user and group balugdns) should mostly only be able to alter the few exception files (or contents of directories needed to support such), noted above (e.g. PID files, etc.).
• THE PRIMARY PURPOSE FOR THE BALUG DNS SERVER is for serving DNS zones of interest to BALUG and/or any other such hosting BALUG deems appropriate or wishes to do for folks/organizations (e.g. reciprocal or hosted slave services, etc.)
• Note that version control (RCS) has been put in place for at least a few key files, it should be appropriately used to track changes and note the reason(s) why change(s) were made. It is also generally advisable to preserve mtimes, e.g.:
  # ci -d -l -M file

AT LEAST AT THE PRESENT TIME (2007-05-28), PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING:

• At least some Internet DNS has been delegated to this DNS server (but not yet balug.org.)
• This is subject to change - most current information can probably be found by:
  • having a look at file:/var/named/chroot-balug/var/named/master/balug.org
  • or of course, making the appropriate Internet DNS queries
• as of 2007-05-26 this host should have complete balug.org. zone data (can't do a zone transfer, but as of 2007-05-26 at least Michael Paoli and Jim Stockford should have the access to review what should be all the data that's in the delegated balug.org. DNS), hence the zone data on this host should be complete (with some additional bits of data such as SOA and TTLs determined via responses to DNS queries); it is possible (but unlikely at this point) that some zone data may be missing.
• the various configuration and zone files contain much more relevant detail, including what's noted in the comments.