See Also: named(8), named.conf(5)

If you have problems with your zone files, you probably forgot a "."

named(8) lets you generate lines in your zonefile by

$GENERATE 150-250 $.0.0.10.in-addr.arpa. PTR dhcp-$.example.com.

Remember, MX's and NS records can't point to CNAMEs.

You can have more than one record type for a domain/host, so long as none of them as CNAMEs. ie: you can have two A's, or an A and a TXT, but never an A and a CNAME, or an TXT and a CNAME, or even two CNAMES.

Try and have names for services (such as "proxy", "www", "smtp" etc) as this means when you move a service onto a different machine you can change the DNS once and everything will be updated.

Try and use one name for a NS record for all zones that reside on that machine. for example in "foo.example.com" use "ns1.example.com" and in "example2.com" use "ns1.example.com", this means that when "ns1.example.com" changes it's IP, you will only have to update it once for each registrar, not once per registrar per zone.

Sample zone file

@ IN SOA foo.com. soa.foo.com. (

2002060700 ; serial 10800 ; refresh (3 hours) 3600 ; retry (1 hour) 3600000 ; expire 86400 ) ; minimum

@ IN NS ns1.foo.com. @ IN NS ns2.foo.com. @ IN MX 10 smtp.foo.com. @ IN MX 20 smtp.baz.com. ns1 IN A 1.2.3.4 ns2 IN A 1.2.4.5 smtp IN A 1.2.3.4 box1 IN A 1.2.3.6 proxy IN CNAME box1 pop3 IN CNAME box1 www IN CNAME box1 news IN CNAME box1