[PLUG] Victor is trying to understand DNS

[Victor Soich]

Hi Kevin and PLUG,

A long time ago, I wrote to the PLUG asking questions about DNS.  At
the time I was a bit overwhelmed by all the responses.  I set aside
reading the email responses for awhile, and looked at them again.  I
understand better now.  I guess what I want to do is not mess with DNS
initially, as you indicate in your email below.  I realize now that I
don't have to set up my own DNS server in order to use apache.  I just
use somebody elses DNS server(s).  I want to use DynDNS with Comcast
as you do.  You say you installed a start-up script.  Are you
referring to ddclient or inadyn as shown at:

http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/unix.html

If you use one of these start-up scripts, which one do you prefer?

When you say you run a cron job, are you referring to crontab as shown at:

http://www.learninglinux.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=57

Can you be specific with regard to what would be a good cron job command?


I tried this DynDNS stuff a while ago, but I didn't know what I was
doing.  I think I did apt-get install ddclient on my debian machine.
At one point, the program ran me through some dialog boxes asking me
to set some configuration options.  Some of the configuration stuff, I
couldn't figure out.  I've gone from blind to semi-blind now.  I'm
wondering if in one of the dialog boxes, I set up a cron job, or if
it's the case that I configure whatever it is that I need to configure
with the dialog boxes, and when I'm done, I then set up a cron job.

Any feedback would be most appreciated.

Sincerely,
Victor Soich



On Oct 14, 2007 3:35 PM, Kevin Krumwiede <kjkrum at comcast.net> wrote:
> Victor Soich wrote:
> > Essentially, the only reason I would set up a primary name server and
> > secondary name server is if I had a static IP address at my home, and
> > under that IP address, ( a submask, I think )  I had a network of
> > computers that I wanted to be accessible by the outside Internet.  Is
> > this correct?
> >
> Depends what you mean by "accessible".  If you wanted those machines on
> your subnet to have unique names to the outside world, e.g.
> red.yourdomain.com, blue.yourdomain.com, etc., then you would need to
> set up a nameserver.  But if you just want these machines to provide
> different services through the same domain name, e.g. a dedicated FTP
> server handling ftp://yourdomain.com, a dedicated Web server handling
> http://yourdomain.com, you wouldn't need to mess with DNS at all.
>
> I've used DynDNS to host a site through Comcast.  I installed a startup
> script and cron job that would automatically update DynDNS nameservers
> if the address Comcast gave me ever changed.  You can find the stuff for
> that on SourceForge.  In fact, I think DynDNS has links to it on their site.
>
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