Chapter 4. Setting Up BIND

"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are!"

If you have been diligently reading each chapter of this book, you're probably anxious to get a name server running. This chapter is for you. Let's set up a couple of name servers. Others of you may have read the table of contents and skipped directly to this chapter. (Shame on you!) If you are one of those people, be aware that we may use concepts from earlier chapters and expect you to understand them already.

There are several factors that influence how you should set up your name servers. The biggest is what sort of access you have to the Internet: complete access (e.g., you can FTP to ftp.uu.net), limited access (restricted by a security firewall), or no access at all. This chapter assumes you have complete access. We'll discuss the other cases in Chapter 11.

In this chapter, we set up two name servers for a few fictitious zones as an example for you to follow in setting up your own zones. We cover the topics in this chapter in enough detail to get your first two name servers running. Subsequent chapters fill in the holes and go into greater depth. If you already have your name servers running, skim through this chapter to familiarize yourself with the terms we use or just to verify that you didn't miss something when you set up your servers.