Hosts Begone!
With my move to virtualisation and seemingly non-stop addition of net-enabled appliances, the hosts file I have on all machines has grown to over 20 entries. I thought it was about time I centralised this configuration and ran a local DNS server.
You always hear how the most common DNS server – bind - is a monolithic beast, but if you have reasonably moderate requirements, the implementation is quite simple.
The setup I wanted to achieve was probably very common for a home network. All machines/devices have static IP addresses and are all part of the same class C subnet. All DNS requests (for both local and remote addresses) should be cached by the local DNS server to improve lookup performance. All external DNS requests should be forwarded to my ISP’s DNS server(s). Adding a machine or changing an IP address should require no more the an update on the actual device holding the IP address in question, and an update to the local DNS server. All other machines should then be able to resolve the new hostname.
If this sounds like something you would be interested in (thanks Entourage – or more specifically) see the installation and configuration on the wiki and say hosts file – begone!.
The next obvious step would be to run a DHCP server too, but that is a story for another day.
Posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 5:58 pm.
Filed under Administration, Linux.
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