raymond blogs…

1. Use OpenDNS free services by adding 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 on your /etc/resolv.conf.
2. Go to http://www.opendns.com/support/cache/ then enter the website address.

These free tools have been designed to validate and check the health of your public DNS servers.

Free Secondary DNS for your domains. If your looking for another DNS to put your domain in, this is for you. Providing additional secondary servers can greatly improve the reliability and accessibility of your domain. Should your primary DNS become unavailable due to network problems, your secondary DNS entries come into play, the more DNS servers you have, the greater the resilience to errors.

Here are the steps:

1. Locate named.conf and go to that folder.
2. Add DNS entries for your nameserver.

Edit the pri.yourname.com file for the domain you are adding nameservers for.
Add these two lines at the bottom of the file:
ns1 IN A 10.10.10.10 (replace with your nameserver IP)
ns2 IN A 10.10.10.10
By the way, you can host your website and nameservers on the same IP.

3. Reload the nameserver daemon.
   $ sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 reload
4. Ping the nameservers, and they should resolve to the correct IP.
   If they do not, edit /etc/resolv.conf and add the following line above all other lines beginning with “nameserver”, add:
   nameserver 127.0.0.1
5. Go to your registrar of your domain name, and register the nameservers to point to the your nameserver IP.

To keep the root hints file current, use the following command.

$ dig @a.root-servers.net . ns > db.cache

If you are running BIND 9, you have handy new tools to help maintain your nameserver files: named-checkconf and named-checkzone. These tools reside in /usr/sbin or /usr/local/sbin.

named-checkconf checks the configuration file for syntax errors.
$ /usr/sbin/named-checkconf zonename db.local
zone zonename/IN: loaded serial 1
OK

named-checkzone checks a zone file for syntax errors.
$ /usr/sbin/named-checkzone zonename pri.108.10.20.in-addr.arpa
zone zonename/IN: loaded serial 2004071902
OK