DNS configuration for HPUX servers

[Victor Balenton]

We use /etc/hosts for hosts name,IP address resolution for our backend HPUX servers.These servers have 2 networks configured, FDDI net for communicating between these servers and Ethernet network for communicating with frontend PC's and Intranet use.
The host names and IP address of these Unix servers are setup for FDDI net e.g:10.21.0.xxx
While the Ethernet network is on 10.21.2.xxx, so we have setup the default gateway for 10.21.2.1 -> to communicate with frontend PC network.
Recently we configured some of the Unix printer's IP address and host names to be resolved using DNS servers.
For this, I setup entry in nsswitch.conf as :
hosts: files [NOTFOUND=continue] dns
and have entered the DNS servers entries in /etc/resolv.conf
The DNS servers are Windows2000 based and they support for all host name resolutions and using as FQDN's ( Intranet and Internet domain's ) of the NT and W2K servers at our campus.
Now we have a requirement to configure the HPUX servers to have a Fully qualified domain names,which will need DNS configuration.
So,wanted to know how to go about doing this for our backend FDDI based Unix servers ?
We will have to use Domain name configuration of these servers which will need to be used both for Intranet and Internet use.
Appreciate if you can give some inputs on this.
Thanks much.

[Steven E. Protter]

Couple of things:

A more default DNS setup would be to use files as the backup and DNS as primary.

That will get you more consistent results and make getting email off your box a lot easier.

nsswitch.conf dns

hosts: dns[notfound=continue unavail=continue tryagain=continue] files


Now I'll include the structure you need in named.conf and zone files to pull this off.

zone "isnamerica.com" {
type master; #this can be secondary ..
file "/var/named/isnamerica.com.zone"
}

Contents of the zone file.

A typical, sanitized zone record.

$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA @ dns1.investmenttool.com (
2003080704 ; serial
3600 ; refresh
3600 ; retry
604800 ; expire
86400 ; ttl
)


@ IN NS dns1.investmenttool.com.
@ IN NS dns2.investmenttool.com.
@ IN MX 10 isnamerica.com. ; primary mail exchanger

@ A 66.82.143.168
www A 66.82.143.168
news A 66.82.143.168
shell A 66.82.143.168
smtp A 66.82.143.168
dns1 A 66.82.143.164
dns2 A 66.82.143.165

ftp CNAME isnamerica.com.
mail CNAME isnamerica.com.


This will provide dns service, locally or to the public interent for the isnamerica zone. There is no limit to how many servers can be added to this database.

These changes are implemented as follows:

/sbin/init.d/named stop
/sbin/init.d/named start

SEP

[Victor Balenton]

Hi Peter,

I did not quite understand your suggestion with named and zone configuration for implementing DNS service.
My issue is since the Unix server's IP addresses are based on FDDI net,as all the servers communicate with each other for SAP application on backend FDDI network only then having the hosts name /IP resolution moved for these servers to a W2K DNS based servers, which is on different network altogether, which of the below options will be better one ?
a)to implement a separate DNS server for the Unix servers on the FDDI net and make it accessible to Intranet/Internet clients via Ethernet ?
Or
b) to use existing W2K DNS servers ? with this,I will have to remove all entries in the hosts file on Unix servers and make the hosts/IP resolution using the W2K DNS servers, I think with this the performance of our SAP application will be poor on account of network delays accessing W2K DNS servers.

Thanks,

[Steven E. Protter]

Based on your perfmance concerns, I would go by option a.

Set up a HP-UX/UNIX DNS server based on examples above and this url:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/DNS-HOWTO.html

This document works with BIND 9.2.x from software.hp.com Though a Linux doc, the configuration files work just fine on HP-UX

I actually think the Windows 2K unified approach is better, but I can't test your performance concerns, therefore can not recommend that approach.

I will tell you that we are using W2K for primary DNS and it works reasonably well. We keep an HP-Ux server ready as a hot backup.

The hot backup keeps things moving when the Windows DNS is having trouble.

Option a will work.

SEP