Hi folks. I'm a newbie to DNS but I have actually read the book "DNS and BIND" from O'Reilly, so I have a good understanding of the concepts, it's just some implementation details that i'm fuzzy on that aren't covered.

So... how can I setup my SM server (which is running RHEL v3 without CPanel/Plesk/WHM) to be both a primary and secondary nameserver? I'm looking for a tutorial or at least a list of the basic configuration settings I'll need.

My domain is valleyfree.com, so I would want it setup as ns1.valleyfree.com / ns2.valleyfree.com. My box's hostname is www1.valleyfree.com. Specific questions:

- How specifically does one server running bind act as two nameservers? Is it just a matter of telling bind to listen on two IPs, ala Apache? How do I accomplish this?
- Is it OK to have two names (www1, ns1) have "A" records to the same IP, or should I use a CNAME record to point ns1 to www1 (the system hostname)?
- Besides adding a zone for valleyfree.com and a zone file with the appropriate SOA, NS, A, CNAME, and MX records, what else would one typically have to do to get a vanilla RHEL v3 distro functional as a nameserver?

Additionally, I was hoping to have SM run as a slave (tertiary) in case my box goes offline. Has anyone done this?

Many thanks in advance!

-josh w.

If you use cPanel, all you have to do is setup 2 A records, for example ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com and point each to a diffrent IP address on the server. Bind listens on all available IP addresses, so that's all you need to do. Except, you then have to register those two nameservers, as nameservers, with the domain Registrar that you have domain.com listed.

Having said that, please read the comments in this thread:
http://forums.servermatrix.com/viewtopic.php?p=55598