[Preston] DNS Question

[David Farrell]

DNS can get messy. Caching only nameservers can provide the wrong
information if the real information changes. Setting up the servers
ain't too complicated. The DNS is the biggest distributed database on
the planet. It takes a lot of study to get your head round it. The
reason you need to point to proxy servers is that the address range your
school has is not globally routable (a private address range a la
RFC1918). Unless you've dozens of hosts, just use a hosts file on each
machine. If you've time to try setting up a dns server, you've time to
administer a hosts file. Which is of course where DNS was born... The
distribution of host files... DNS is a great head bender. Love it.

-----Original Message-----
From: preston-admin@mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:preston-admin@mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Andrew King
Sent: 22 January 2003 18:56
To: preston@mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: [Preston] DNS Question

Hi all,

Despite spending a small while going through google and the likes, 
there's something I've still not figured out at DNS.

Our network uses internal IPs, in the range 10.67.24.0/22. We're one 
school out of many, and each school in Lancashire has been allocated a 
different set of IPs in this 10.x.x.x line.

We have a link to the Internet, and to get an Internet connection, we 
need to point out workstations to the DNS servers 212.219.82.4 and 
212.219.83.4. We then have to point our browsers to 
proxy.lancsngfl.ac.uk:8080 (since they firewall practically everything 
and just give us a proxy and DNS). That's fine, and it's what we're 
doing at the moment.

I've recently been setting Linux up though and moving some of the 
functions of the network over to Linux - the first and second years now 
have a 25MB quota limit on their N:\ drives, and when they want to go on

the Net, instead of going straight to the NGFL proxy, they go to our 
proxy, which asks for their NT username and password again, and then 
checks this off against an ACL in /etc/squid.conf to decide whether 
they're allowed on the Internet or not (if anyone wants to know how to 
do this stuff, let me know - I'm slowly writing up documents on how to 
do it and putting them on my site).

I know we don't need it, but I'd /like/ to have internal DNS, if at all 
possible. Partly just so that I can set up a DNS server somewhere and 
learn how it's done. I've read a fair bit into BIND, and messed with 
config files, but that's all. Here's my question though:

Our Linux server is 10.67.24.6. It'd be much easier to call this 
something like timmy, for instance, so that I can refer people to our 
internal web site with:

http://timmy

instead of:

http://10.67.24.6

Similarly, it'd be useful to be able to refer to things like network 
printers, wireless access points, important workstations, etc, by 
hostnames. We've got NetBIOS names, which are sometimes useful - but 
they're not always - they don't work for everything.

So that's the question: how does DNS work on an internal network? Can I 
set up a DNS server that can resolve things on 10.67.24.0/22 by itself 
or send on the request to a 'real' DNS server on the Internet if that 
doesn't work?

If someone could clear that up for me, it'll save me a load of 
reading... thanks :))

Andrew


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