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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> If you can't manage your DNS then hand in your nerd card.

Here you go :(.

   +---------------------------------------------------+
   |                  NERD CARD                        |
   | ISSUED: 1988                 LOCATION: INTERWEBZ  |
   |                                                   |
   |  This is to certify the card holder,              |
   |                                                   |
   |                   TeMPOraL                        |
   |   _____________________________________________   |
   |                                                   |
   |   is a certified Nerd of                          |
   |                                                   |
   |   [x] space                  [ ] cryptography     |
   |   [x] programming            [ ] literature       |
   |   [ ] networking             [ ] language         |
   |                                                   |
   +---------------------------------------------------+

I do intend to take it back though. Any hints on good sources to grok DNS?

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The documentation for djbdns covers a lot of it, including in particular descriptions of mistakes made by a lot of people (and software).

https://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html

You can also go right to the source.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt

At what level do you want to understand things? I feel that getting the basics is best done by trying it out yourself, though a badly configured public server can be used to attack other people, so be mindful of who has access to your server when you're trying things out. If you just want the theory, Wikipedia is a pretty good resource for technical things.

If you just want to see how DNS works, set up a server yourself. You could start with a simple caching one like unbound, and then get yourself a domain and set up a real server (eg. nsd or bind) for that. You could for example use Hurricane Electric's free DNS service as your main nameservers and make use of zone transfers and notifications to keep things up-to-date from your local server, giving you a small-scale "real-world" DNS setup.

> At what level do you want to understand things?

What I know:

DNS is a server that translates domains to IP addresses. A DNS entry maps domain name to some various properties like "A entry", "AAA entry", "CNAME entry", etc., most of which I don't know what they do. DNS servers are linked together by magic, to provide a somewhat-eventually-consistent global domain->IP mapping.

What I want to know:

How the whole thing works, what DNS properties ("entries") mean exactly and why, and eventually how to run my own DNS server.

Thanks for the tips, sounds like a good starting point.

And what if i somehow landed a job at a small office without any expert knowledge (only from tinkering with my own unix machines since years) and now i need to set up a simple DNS in a virutal machine of us ?

We have all clients in one network. So i really need only a simple DNS without any complex setup. But sadly i cant find any good tutorial what i have to expect and be aware of. All i can find are some three line tutorials (do this and then this and here you go, now you have a DNS), but not more. Cant you point me to some good guide ?

dnsmasq is simple enough. If you just need to define some local names, you can literally just install it and configure those addresses in /etc/hosts on the same machine. The server will pick them up automatically and serve them as A records.

Nice card. Those two crosses probably tell a story.

DNS is really just a fancy address book. My point above was really aimed at AD sysadmins - if you have AD then you will also have MS DNS which is very easy to setup compared to say BIND or PowerDNS (my weapons of choice).

It's a bit hard for me to give recommendations but you could poke around here: http://www.bind9.net/manuals and here: https://www.powerdns.com/documentation.html and the WP page for DNS is probably quite complete.

Thanks for the links. I guess I need to sit down and focus on that for a few weeks.

> Nice card. Those two crosses probably tell a story.

It's a long story, but in short: I grew up watching Star Trek: TNG, and it shaped my interests quite profoundly.

Your nerd card is old. Older than the WWW. No wonder you need to grok DNS. (Jokes aside this nerd card is a really cool format. May I should put this in the about me section somewhere)

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