DNS for a Demon dial-up domain

[Matthew Seaman]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 01:57:59PM +0100, Neil Ford wrote:
> From: Neil Ford <neil at ourshack.com>
> 
> Thanks to Mac OS X's crazy way of handling /etc/hosts files (it doesn't!), I'm
> finally having to look at getting DNS working in the flat.

Trolling through the old and not recently used grey cells, I seem to remember that under NeXTSTEP the magic invocation was:

niload hosts / < /etc/hosts

Alternatively, there should be a mechanism in Netinfo equivalent to
/etc/nsswitch.conf which can be tweaked to make lookups go to flat
files first.  Of couse, that's assuming that Apple haven't completely
revamped the whole of Netinfo for reason of their own.
 
> What I think I need is a DNS server just to provide details for just the
> machines on the local network and to pass on aything else to Demon's
> nameservers. Currently I have all of the machines set-up as 
> something.binky.demon.co.uk. The thing I'm not sure about is how I do this
> without screwing up DNS for binky.demon.co.uk.
> 
> Is what I'm trying to achieve possible or should I be doing something
> different? All and any advice would be appreciated.

I did something similar at my very-soon-to-be previous work place.
The DNS data in the internal private (RFC1918) networks is a superset
of what is in the registered Internet visible zone.  So long as you
make sure that your internal machines always use your internal servers
and that they are either primary or secondary for your private domain,
and that the A record for binky.demon.co.uk matches what's on demon's
servers everything should work smoothly.

You'll need to set up an in-addr.arpa zone for the reverse lookups for
your private network, but the reverse lookup for your registered
address can be left to Demon's servers to handle.

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                          26 The Paddocks
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Tel: +44 1628 476614                                     Bucks., SL7 1TH UK