Skip to main content

domain name system - Intranet BIND server fallback to internet DNS servers?



On our local small business network, we have a need to run a intranet-only BIND (named) DNS server for only local, intranet-only addresses. For example, we do a lot of web development on the network, so having a DNS server to manage local addresses (example: testsite3.local) is beneficial.



One aspect of this we are unsure of is, currently all the business desktops have their DNS servers set to 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.76.76, which are Comcast internet DNS servers (Comcast is our business ISP). So if we change the computer's DNS to point instead to our local DNS server, how do you setup bind to "forward" all failed requests out to the Comcast DNS servers?




For example, if someone on the network trys to visit www.google.com, their computer will first check with our local DNS server, which obviously doesn't have internet DNS records in it like google.com. So then, either the computer needs to know to check with the secondary or tertiary DNS servers OR can the local DNS server somehow request the info from 75.75.75.75 or 75.75.76.76? Is this something called zone transfers?



I know that on each individual computer (OSX in this case) that I can manually set the primary DNS to be the local server, and then secondary and tertiary servers to be the Comcast DNS servers. But I wanted to see if there was a better, more manageable way on the server side to do this.


Answer



DNS clients do not work like this, they do not "fall back" to the other records. A properly-functioning DNS client should choose a server at random from its configured list to spread the query load evenly, and have alternate servers in case one should go offline.



If you need to serve both internal and external DNS records then you should have your client machines configured to only use the internal DNS servers, and configure your internal server to attempt to resolve any non-locally defined DNS records from the external server.



The beginning of this would be the allow-recursion directive in BIND. Just be sure that you do not allow recursive lookups from machines not on your network as that is how DNS Amplification Attacks happen.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

linux - iDRAC6 Virtual Media native library cannot be loaded

When attempting to mount Virtual Media on a iDRAC6 IP KVM session I get the following error: I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and: $ javaws -version Java(TM) Web Start 1.6.0_16 $ uname -a Linux aud22419-linux 2.6.28-15-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 31 13:39:06 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2009 mozilla.org On Windows + IE it (unsurprisingly) works. I've just gotten off the phone with the Dell tech support and I was told it is known to work on Linux + Firefox, albeit Ubuntu is not supported (by Dell, that is). Has anyone out there managed to mount virtual media in the same scenario?

ubuntu - Monitoring CPU, Mem, disk, on a single server

I've been looking for a simple starter solution for monitoring my [currently] single server hosted solution. Other than Nagios and similar, are there other good (simple) solutions people are using? Answer Everything depends on what you want. For example Munin is very simple, you can install and configure it in less then 10 minutes (on one server), it can sends alarms, make graphs from monitoring cpu, mem. apache connections, eaccellerator, disk io and many many more (it has many plugins). But if you are planning in future get some more machines, munin may not be enough. For example in munin you cant monitor state of individual processes, can't monitor changes in files (for security purpose). So if you wanna only see what is the utilization of basics parameters on your server and don't plan to buy some more servers Munin is what you are looking for, but if you wanna be alarmed when some of your service is down, take more control on what is happeninig on...

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits, ...