Advice on basic DNS configuration

[goomba]

Tomorrow I'll be installing a Leopard Open Directory/mail server for a small business that has until now been server-less. The company's website is hosted externally, on "domain.com"

1) I want to use "domain.com" as the local domain, but I gather there will be problems when internal clients try to access the public website. Should I use a different name, like "domain.local" or is there a way to mange "domain.com" requests that aren't hosted locally?

2) Can I still use the DNS provided by my ISP to handle external name lookups? I don't want my server to have that responsibility.

DNS is still a mystery to me, so I'd love to know what constitutes good practice. Many thanks!

 

[cmuench]

A 1. Yes you are correct in that if you use domain.com as the internal domain name it will cause problems. What you could do is just do domain as the domain name. That way it won't affect things. Oh and you have to make the openldap the dns server for the clients and then make the server shoot the "real" dns requests to your isp external. who is handling dhcp on your network? That is where you need to change the dns setting.

 

[goomba]

Thanks cmuench – The clients will get DHCP directly from the router. But to bind to Open Directory won't they have to use the local DNS?

 

[hmmfe]

You won't really have any issues using your server as the authoritative DNS server for domain.com. All you have to remember is create an A record for http://www.domain.com and point it to the outside address of your web server. If you have any other FQDNs on the outside, you'll have to create A record entries for those too. Not really hard, but you have to remember to enter all of them or your internal users would end up not being able to resolve those names.

You can use the ISP DNS server for queries that are not domain.com. You just have to configure DNS to use forwarder addresses. You'll have to edit named.conf and add the ISP's DNS server IP addresses under forwarders. With this configuration, your clients will contact your server first. It will respond for domain.com only. Otherwise, it will forward the query to your configured forwarders.