“Linux system administrators should learn traditional DNS. Front-ends and quick templates to setup domain records have a place in managing sites. When confronted with DNS configurations already in existence, nothing can substitute for knowing and using the fundamentals. The vast majority of users on the Internet have no clue about DNS. They may have seen the term when they set up their ISP connection, but they do not realize its connection to their lives. Simply put, DNS servers allow you to use friendly names in your browser, email or other Internet applications to perform tasks which require IP addresses.”
The author did not really describe what he meant about “traditional”. I’m guessing he means those other contraptions eg PHP+MySQL based zone files as the non-traditional ones, of course. But I never use those. It just gives it more failure points (oh no, my db was hacked; somebody wiped by PHP scripts off!). If one regards himself as an admin, he should at least know this. And if you’re lazy to manually type in every zone file, just cp and learn :%s on vi.
Edited 2006-04-09 19:05
This article should be called “Configuring BIND on Linux” since it has little to do with the DNS system and everything to do with how to configure BIND.
Edited 2006-04-10 09:13
For once, a great starter/summary article. Read it, then go buy one of these 500+ pages to dig for more details. This is the right approach: who wants / has time to read one of those bibles just to get an idea of what DNS does and how it does it ?