FreeBSD Usefull Stuff Page

• A while back I had to go through the process of learning how to change my Domain from one that was previously delegated to my ISP to one that I could manage myself. In other words to change my DNS server to an Authoritive Domain one.

  My previous connection to the outside world was a permanent 56K modem and static IP address. I ran a local DNS server with Web, Mail and gateway setup. All of this has worked fine for 3 years or so, never missing a beat. The change came around because I wanted faster access and also in my case, it turned out quite a bit cheaper for the amount of data I put through each month.

  I found plenty of help sites and examples on the web but not one that really help me get my head around my particular setup requirements here at home.

  So I now had two NICs, a WAN address and a LAN address (and a wife wanting this to happen asap) to contented with . I had to get the DNS server to be available to the outside world as well as keep the Web server, Mail server, FTP server and gateway for the internal Lan.

  The FreeBSD server handled all this fine so the steps I took were:

  1. Firstly, before you even start, you'll need to do a bit a research on Bind and DNS. Just do a search on "freeBSD dns setup" or similar on Google.
  2. I setup a new account with a new ISP that I liked, requesting a static IP address (because I'm a bit of purist).
  3. Setup my adsl modem (mine was a DSL300+ with pppoe built-in) so that it connected to my new ISP's ADSL service.
  4. Changed to a new Domain registry company and transferred my existing domain to them. I let that go through and set for a day or so keeping the existing delegation in place.
  5. Next I changed (after quite a bit of stuffing around) my named server configuration files as per the linked text file below.
  6. Reboot server. Cross fingers, legs eyes and anything else.
  7. I next tested the domain locally to make sure everything was resolving OK.
  8. I contacted my ISP to ask if they could act as a secondary DNS point as two are required (but not neccessary).
  9. Finally, I changed the delegation of the domain to the new addresses and waited while everything filtered through. This took up to 48 hours to complete but started almost straight anyway.
  10. To finish off, I headed to www.dnsreport.org to check if the world was seeing everything OK.
  11. Celebrate, let wife pat me on back, life back to normal (but faster and in control).

      Bind (Named) Configuration Layout.