This document is not intended as a "total" guide for administring the DJBDNS-package. Neither is it intended to be without errors. These are just the experiences I had when setting up DJBDNS.

First of all, what is DJBDNS? I quote Henning Brauer on www.lifewithdjbdns.com

djbdns is a simple software kit for serving and resolving DNS data. It is intended to be a replacement for BIND in many settings, although it does not yet include every feature implemented by BIND, and may never do so; djbdns includes features that can be demonstrated to be needed, and there are some features offered by BIND that do not make the cut. Like qmail, especially in its younger days, djbdns can require some redesign to deploy.

I wanted to use DJBDNS because I had to much trouble maintaining the /etc/hosts file on my LAN.
For one or two machines it's not really a trouble. When the LAN keeps growing it's almost impossible to keep them up-to-date. Off course, when you're one of those who installs a system and afterwards never touches the set-up, it's a one-time-job. But then you wouldn't be using GNU/Linux, would you?
For now, DJBDNS is running a while with not much off maintenance and it's giving some more spare time to look into other facts of controlling my GNU/Linux-machines. I'm using it as the nameserver for my local domain and as a caching-name-server.

2. Useful resources

Al lot of the this material is "collected" together from various other resources.
For a detailed explanation of how DJBDNS works I would strongly suggest you visit these pages and read through them. Pick out the things you need and you'll see that putting it all together isn't as hard as it could seem of the first sight.

Life With DJBDNS - http://www.lifewithdjbdns.com
Official DJBDNS-page - http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html
DJBDNS by Russel Nelson - http://www.djbdns.org

Maybe a bit over the head but still useful information can be found in a nice HowTo that's written by Nicolai Langfeldt and that can be found at DNS HowTo - http://linuxdocs.org/HOWTOs/DNS-HOWTO.html
There's also a mailinglist, dns@list.cr.yp.to. Subscribe by sending an empty mail to dns-subscribe@list.cr.yp.tp unsubscribing works similar by sending an empty mail to dns-unsubscribe@list.cr.yp.to

3. What's DNS all about?

Off course, before you could setup either a caching-name-server or your own nameserver, it could come in handy that you now a little about what DNS is all about.
Everybody who has been surfing the internet has come, in some way or another, come in contact with DNS. In one sentence I could describe DNS as :

DNS takes care of matching the right URL (WWW, FTP or something else) with the correct IP-address.

There, that's says it. We can finish now?
Not quite. Look at this nice definition found in the DNS-HowTo mentioned above :

DNS is is the Domain Name System. DNS converts machine names to the IP addresses that all machines on the net have. It maps from name to address and from address to name, and some other things. A mapping is simply a association between two things, in this case a machine name, like ftp.linux.org, and the machines IP number (or address) 199.249.150.4.

In fact, to be completely honest, that's almost all I know from DNS. And even I could get DJBDNS running. So, isn't this a nice example that you don't have to be a full technical expert to have your own nameserver? But please, when you're knowledge stops here, don't let the 'whole' public use your nameserver because this could get some quite unpleasant results!
Off course, some more knowledge could come in handy!
So, to complete the picture, I'll go a bit more in depth on DNS. You could skip this section but bear in mind that you lose half of the fun!

4. DNS more in depth

The Domain Name Service (DNS) is like a very huge, distributed database that's supporting delegation of authority for segments of the key space. The prime use is for mapping hostnames to the IP-addresses. For now, to my knowledge, they are only capable of coping with IPv4. So with the upcoming (10 years?) introduction of IPv6 things need to be relooked. Besides this mapping, it could provide you also with some extra information about the different hosts and special routing support. A DNS-database consists of different record types to define its own internal heirarchical structure and the delegation of subdomains.
Off course, due to the complex nature of this material, there are quite a bunch of concepts that are used with DNS. I'm not going to cover all of them, just the main part to give you an idea what's out there.
One thing we've got to get right is that there's no "master" DNS. There are several off them! They are called 'root-servers'. In fact, one of the key-concepts of DNS is that a bunch of servers are exchanging their data. They are passing Resource Records (RR) around. There are many types of RRs and several protocols exist for requesting them. Normally DNS is carried around on the internet on port 53, both TCP and UDP. Take a look in your /etc/service file and be convinced! Most of the queries go over UDP. TCP is only used when the total of RR's exceeds 512 byes or for performing a "zone transfer" (keep this term in mind).

...more to come...

x. Configuration

For my LAN I have one caching nameserver (DNSCACHE) and one local DNS (TINYDNS) that serves all hosts that belong to my LAN. My caching nameserver is listening on IP 192.168.1.1 and the local DNS is listening on the localhost-ip 127.0.0.1.

When I query for a local hosts-ip I'd like the caching nameserver to respond with the right address. To do so, he needs to consult the nameserver (TINYDNS) that is "working" for my domain in question. Out of the box, he doesn't know wich NS he needs to contact. For this to work you need to put a reference to the nameserver in /service/dnscache/root/servers. Just create a file in that directory (with the name of the domain) that holds the ip-address of the nameserver that needs to be contacted.

So, for example when I want to serve mylocaldomain.com

put

127.0.0.1

in /service/dnscache/root/servers/mylocaldomain.com

After you have created this file, copy it to /service/dnscache/root/servers/1.168.192.in-addr.arpa for the reverse 'thing'. Make sure that both files are readable by the DNS cache account.

Restart dnscache with

svc -t /service/dnscache

...more to come...

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