DNS - L I V E S .........

[David Rankin]

Andrew & Kenny - Thank You!

    DSN will talk to me again!  I still don't have the dynamic DNS
completely right, but God it sure is nice to have nslookup speaking to
me again.  I couldn't have done it without your help. Ok, here is the
status.

    Like a numer of us, I have the uncanny nack of making life far too
difficult for myself. You are goinng to sh!$ when you find out what my
DNS problem was. I am somewhat embarressed to send this out public, but
I think this is a great lesson for all of us. (perhaps not for the
informed, but for the uninformed, it is worth its weight in gold.

    First, when DNS died, I picked through all of the logs to try and
make sense out of what was goung on (NO Dice). In my message log I had
an innocuous line that complained about a syntax "^M" error in named
.conf. Totally my fault! I had assumed (ass out of u & me) that the
editor (FMview) I was using from the win side of the house wouldn't put
a CRLF in the file opened from the Linux box (wrong answer Mary-Lou) It
works great for editing files as long as you never hit return.

    Notwithstanding the prior FUBAR (fuc%ed up beyound all recognition),
I had used the "//" notation (like you would use in "named.conf") in the
zone files for a couple of comment lines. (poor choice to say the least)

    Yes, after numerous (named & ndc) restarts, I had some orphaned
"named" processes hanging around that was resolved with Andrew's
suggestions.

    Now named actually does start and run great (almost) forward and
reverse lookups for my linux box work great for the box itself. DHCP
will now allow domain logons. The domain logon scripts work from all
machines.

    HOWEVER, I have another DNS problem.  DNS works forwards and
backwards for my Linux box, but what is really weird, is that when I
logon from and Win9x box (with domain logins) , if I try an nslookup
from my Linux box, for the machine/user that got a dynamic IP, I get
nothing but an error from nslookup. "can't find host"

    In my named.conf, I have used allow-update{any}; instead of using
"key etc..." because my install didn't give me a dnsgeygen file to
create a TSIG key. From what I have read, this should work because the
ACL list variable "any" is predefined and should allow anyone (address)
to update the zone files.

    This is where I am at (still somewhat lost in the ddns fog). Can
anyone give me some suggestions on how to make DNS register my DHCP
clients so that I will be able to do a dnslookup on the hosts that are
logged in and get an IP in return? What am I missing? (Better yet, what
information can I send you to help figure out what I am missing?  Thanks
to everyone for the help!

David Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Nacogdoches, Texas
drankin at cox-internet.com

(Ain't life wonderful pretending you are your own CIO?)