NS and DNS confusion

[Digital-Vortex]

Hey all,

Need some help/guidelines

I bought a new domain which i want to point to my home network to host a webpage, email, and a few other services. I have access to windows 2000, 2003, Netware. And of course Linux.

How i need to set up an NS for my domain, Which i have been led to beleive is just a DNS server. So can i set up the DNS server to use that domain, and then tell the register to point it to the IP? Or do i need to register a Name Server somewhere before i can do that? also, can i point the MX record to the IP?

Also, If i choose to run Windows to use the AD enviroment, should i use a .local extension? or the .com for the domain?

Thanks, Im not a Noobie to networking, but ive never worked with DNS and such, so decided to jump in the deep end and learn to swim

 

[MorfiusX]

As far a AD goes, a good practice is to name your internal domain .local. Then have a seperate external domain that's .com. This is called split DNS. It's a highly recomended way of doing things.

What you are going to need to do for the external DNS is go to your registrar. They should have a way to manage the nameservers for your domain. They might even provide a DNS service for free. But, you need to point the domain to a DNS server that will be authoritative for your domain.

Then, on that autoritative server, you will need to create your host records. MX records usually point to an A (host) record similar to an Alias (CNAME), except for mail.

There are some pretty good guides to DNS if you look around.

 

[Digital-Vortex]

So im looking at 2 DNS servers if i go the windows route?

 

[nessus]

So im looking at 2 DNS servers if i go the windows route?

No you can host as many domains as you want on one DNS server no matter what the platform.

For example, the DNS records for your AD domain that is not accessible to the rest of the world would be in the mydomain.local forward lookup zone, while the external records will be in the mydomain.com forward lookup zone.

You probably want more than one DNS server just for redundancies sake (assuming you are not running an everything one one box solution like SBS 2003 where if the DNS box is down, so is everything else anyway so it doesn't matter if anybody can resolve your address or not).

I have lots of stuff running all one one box (although each of the functions is running on one of three virtual servers using Virtual server 2005), but I have a buddy acting as my secondary DNS anyway using secondary zone transfers.

 

[MorfiusX]

So im looking at 2 DNS servers if i go the windows route?

As stated, a single DNS server can host multple zones.

Depending on how much name resolution traffic you have, it might be easier to use your registrars DNS. Or, NetriPlex has a service that is pretty cheap.

If you want to reduce your DNS query traffic, you can up the TTL of the record to something around 24 hours. I changed the TTL for a client from 1 hour to 1 day and their DNS queries went from ~35k per day to ~3k per day. The only caveat is that a change can take up to 1 day to take affect accross the internet.