With my previous post regarding setting up a web server another item that should be on your agender if your setting up this sort of software would be an authoritive name server to serve out your DNS records for the domains you plan on serving out.

unfortunatly in my browsing i have been unable to find as nice a solution as I did for nginx to serve out a large number of domains. but what i did find was a dns server called maraDNS, the little cousin to BIND. This allows me to run an authoritative name server using less then 200kB of RAM!

# The address this DNS server runs on.  If you want to bind
# to all addresses a given machine has, use "0.0.0.0".
bind_address = "127.0.0.1, 111.222.333.444"
# The directory with all of the zone files
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"
# The numeric UID MaraDNS will run as
maradns_uid = 105
# The (optional) numeric GID MaraDNS will run as
maradns_gid = 109
# The maximum number of threads (or processes, with the zone server)
# MaraDNS is allowed to run
maxprocs = 96
# we are the authority on all under here!
csv2 = {}
csv2["domain.com."]       =  "domain.com"

by any stretch this config file is very simple binding the server to 127.0.0.1 (to allow the use of the Askmara tool to check configuration) ONE of the servers external IP addresses and lastly we give a list of the domain that mara will serve for us.

there is only one peice of magic i have found with mara and that is in th zone config files that i have written like the following:

#give authority information
Issuing NS           | Contact email              | Serial No | Refresh [1h] | retry [10m] | expire [1d] | min ttl [1h]
% soa ns1.domain.com.  email.domain.com.            1            3600           600           86400         3600
% ns ns1.domain.com.
% ns ns2.domain.com.
#main web ip
% a 204.74.215.149
#subdomains
ftp.% cname %
www.% cname %
#mail server
% mx 0 mail.%
mail.% a 67.202.107.113

This allows this zone file to be used for ANY domain the server will send out using these basic records so you only need to make a unique file if you have unique dns entry’s (extra subdomains etc) this is able to be done since maraDNS parses % as the zone being served set in the main config file.

and that’s all I really have to say on that count. Again another peice of software helping to bring you this page explained.