New Work Study Job

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 10:09:05PM -0400, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I'm a bit of a dabbler as far as OSes go, and I've installed my share 
> of Linux distros (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake PPC, YDL, Debian, gentoo-ppc) 
> and I was sure to say this when I got to school and applied for my job 
> at ResNet/Campus IT.  Come to find out I am the only other person who 
> really knows anything about Linux (and being that money is scarce free 
> is looking even better.)  They told me today (my 3rd day on the job) 
> that they wanted me to install my favorite distro on a machine that was 
> to be a BIND "caching" server.  The other guy who knows about Linux 
> said he wanted it chroot jail-ed and configurable by webmin if 
> possible.  Being as how I am mostly a desktop user and have only had 
> server wise setting up and configuring apache, ssh, and mailman this 
> has me a bit nervous.  I have decided to go with Debian (Woody, Sarge 
> or Sid I haven't decided but I'm obviously leaning towards Woody).  Do 
> any battle hardened guru's have advice / pointers before I start?  
> Anything really would be greatly appreciated.

It's a production server, therefore you go with stable.

If you want a caching DNS server, it's extremely easy. bind and
webmin-bind are apt-gettable. You need a named.conf:

// a caching only nameserver config
zone "." in {
 type hint;
 file "db.cache";
};

Then create a db.cache:
dig @.aroot-servers.net . ns > db.cache

And restart bind. 

djbdns and maradns are good alternatives to bind -- neither has the
horrible security record of bind.


-dsr-