DNS? Eh Wot?

Hello Friendly People

After sucessfully re-selling my reseller accounts with a provider I am now looking to buy a dedicated server.

I know most things about IIS and windows technologies and alothugh i know the fundamentals about DNS but I don't know anything about DNS services on windows

How do you run a DNS server so I can have ns1.myhostblah.com and ns2.myhostblah.com on my one server? Do I need third-party software? Do I need to register anything special? Do I need more than 1 IP?

Please help!

Cheers

Alex.

The ns1.myhostblah.com and ns2.myhostblah.com records will need to be created with the myhostblah.com domain registrar (most registrar's have an option for this in the web control panel).

Ideally you will need two IP addresses, although you could just point both those records to the same IP address.

Then you have to choose DNS server software. I run djbdns on Linux, which has proven to be a very stable and simple option. Since you're running Windows, I don't know what to recommend. Maybe the Microsoft DNS server?

Either way, you'll have to read the documentation for that to get up and running.

Once you have it set up, you can set the authorative servers for a domain (say, example.com) to your DNS servers (ns1.myhostblah.com and ns2.myhostblah.com in your case). Caches around the internet will then ask those servers for information about example.com. You must set up your DNS server to answer queries for example.com, and also DNS records for this domain.

An SOA record defines what server(s) are authorative for that domain. For example, ns1.myhostblah.com and ns2.myhostblah.com

An A record defines the IP address that a domain has. For example, the A record for example.com might be 10.10.10.10. When someone entered example.com in their browser, your DNS server would receive a query and it would return 10.10.10.10 as the IP address.

An MX record defines the server that mail for that domain should be directed to. For example, if someone writes to you@example.com, their mail server will look up the MX records for example.com and connect to that server to deliver mail. MX records can have different distances (or "priorities") attached - for example, you might want mail delivered to a backup mail server if the first one is unavailable.

And there are some other records as well, CNAME and PTR are the other major ones, see here for more info.