djbdns HOWTO for Mac OS X

mattsimerson writes "Looking for a more secure and reliable alternative to BIND for serving DNS on Mac OS X? Look no further than the article I wrote up on the topic. I use djbdns extensively in a large network environment (hundreds of thousands of zones and servers) and it works just as well on my G4 laptop. If you're a heavy duty DNS guy, you might enjoy my other DNS links." Excellent. I am just a dumb programmer, not a sysadmin. It takes me hours to figure out how to configure something relatively simple in NetInfo, so this HOWTO is very welcome.

Put this in the right place

[Matthias Wiesmann]

This is nice and good, but should such information not be put where it should, i.e in the collection of how-to [darwinfo.org] document for darwin?

Re:Put this in the right place

[jasonwileymac.com]

Slow news day..

It probably should, but...

[Big Sean O]

then I would have never found darwinfo.org.

The internet's so big that sometimes I don't even realize I need to know about a site until I read about it somewhere else.

I've been looking for a quality Mac OS X/Darwin site for a while now and apple.slashdot.org and macslash.com are the two places I go to find links to quality sites. Beats googling for hours...

Netinfo

[SlamMan]

Don't feel bad, even those of us that are sys admins are still having a fair amount of trouble usng NetInfo. NetInfo's what we need more tutorials on.

Re:Netinfo

[mjpaci]

I'm going to have to agree with you on this. There are plenty of tutorials on getting Lego Mindstorm to work, Apache, BIND, SENDMAIL, but very little on NetInfo.

--Mike

Re:Netinfo

[analog_line]

I completely agree. I just got my hands on OS X Server and NetInfo is certainly the most complicated and voodoo-laden portions I've run across so far.

I've had more experience dealing with Unix systems than most MacOS-only sysadmins I deal with, and I can divine the basic meanings of most of the stuff in there, but I know I can't use it to it's full exent with my limited knowledge, and it's not exactly something you want to just mess around with semi-randomly unless you enjoy reinstalling the operating system.

Anyone heard of someone writing a book on it?

Re:djbdns

[castlan]

Correct, DJBDNS is not Free Software. But then again, neither is Darwin, you theres not really any loss there. If Freedom is your concern, then perhaps you should try a different flavor of BSD. Or MkLinux if you wasnt to feel closer to the substructure of Darwin.

Of course, there will be lots of work to do to port DisplayPostscript to these other platforms. Perhaps GnuStep would be a good starting point for you.

What, you're not a developer? Then why do you care that DJBDNS isn't Free Software? It is still "free" for end users.

NetInfo documentation source

[Phoukka]

For a PDF from Apple on NetInfo, check out UnderstandingUsingNetInfo.pdf [apple.com]. I've looked it over, haven't read it yet, it seems to be a pretty decent intro.

Re:NetInfo documentation source

[SlamMan]

right, but between this, and apple's 500 page one that totally uninteligable, thats all thhte documentation that can be found.

You could also try BIND 9.

[mellon]

BIND 9 is a complete reimplementation of a domain name server, and does not share any code at all with BIND 8. BIND 9 also supports cryptographic authentication of DNS updates, zone transfers, and so on, and supports DNSSEC. I am currently running BIND 9 on my MacOS X systems, and I'm very happy with the results. Given that I have, in the past, worked for the ISC, I'm a bit biased, but I didn't write any of the code in BIND 9.

I don't know DJB, so I can't really speak to the quality of his code, but I do know the folks who developed BIND 9, and I think they did a really nice job. If you want an open source domain name server, I don't think you can do any better than BIND 9.