Help with DNS on RH9

[rprange]

Hi all, I just recently bought a router for my home, and am in the process of setting up a home network.

I would like to use a RH9 box for DNS and DHCP. DHCP is up and running, but DNS has got me confused, as I have never set up DNS before.

Am I right in thinking that I can set it up so that if my RH9 box cannot resolve a host name, I can set it up to go to my ISPs DNS server, or out to the root servers?

I'm assuming (and I could be entirely wrong) that before I set up the named service I need to

#1 Set the primary DNS suffix on my RH9 box
#2 Set my RH9 box to point to itself to reslve DNS

If this is the case (or if it isnt), any help would be appreciated on how to set that up.

thanks

[Roxoff]

Ideally, you want to point your redhat box at itself for dns AFTER you have it set up and working.

Personally, I've found it easier to set up a root nameserver, using the named.root file ftp'd from here: ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/named.root.

Alongside this, I use my real domain name (the 'live' nameserver out on the internet doesn't provide the names of my inside-the-lan machines, but they never get to ask outside the lan for that domain, it's handled locally).

To tie it all in together, you can have DHCP assign IP's statically from it's pool based on the MAC request address, this makes DNS config pretty easy - you only need a zone file for your lan and it's reverse-lookup file.

If you dont have a live domain name to use, the pick a domain name for your lan that doesn't clash with any top level domains - something like 'home', so you could have 'machine1.home', 'machine2.home', etc., and any stray lookups going out on to the internet will always fail.