I'm going to try to explain this as bast I can though my understanding of a lot of these issues is shaky at best.
I help admin the student computing organization's servers at my school. We would like to offer full virtual domain service to our users, but we do not have a 2nd level domain -- our main domain is wso.williams.edu, also known as gertrude.williams.edu. For now, we ask the school's tech guys to change the DNS whenever we need to a new computer. I'm comfortable staying with that arrangement, but a lot of users have registered domains with places that don't provide DNS service. We can't get the school DNS to change every time this happens, so we've decided to set up our main machine as DNS Nameserver. There's two main issues as I see them -- the actual DNS configuration on the gertrude and getting the machine "known" as a Nameserver out in the wide world. Issue 1: I've looked far and wide on the Internet (probably not far and wide enough) for resources telling me how to set up virtual domain service. Most of the examples are for Bind 4.x which make things tough (we're running 8). Essentially, we'd just like to have a lot of different domains point to the same IP: gertrude's. We'll sort it all out with Apache later (I can handle that part). But I just can't seem to figure out how to do this -- we won't be providing DNS service for the name gertrude.williams.edu or wso.williams.edu -- we just want to specify 10-20 domains that should point to gertrude's IP. I think I need a resource zone file for each domain (all based on some template) but I'm having trouble. If anyone could point me in the direction of a sample named.conf and a resource file or two for someone in my situation I'd be really grateful. Issue 2: As I understand it, none of this means much unless I can specify gertrude as the nameserver for these domains. Currently, I'm told she's not a valid nameserver. Does this mean I need to get the person who runs DNS for gertrude (the school) to edit the DNS records just this once and specify gertrude as a Nameserver? What exactly should I ask them to do? They tend to be pretty helpful as long as I know what I need done. thanks much if any of you made it this far, jeremy A CC: on any reply would be much appreciated - thanks. -- "Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet, Spaceballs "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline; it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." - Frank Zappa
