Intranet DNS server setup

[raul_bhatia]

Hello Linux Gods,
I have a linux machine that I want to use as a server to host applications on. I have installed applications like SugarCRM and Zenoss on this machine and I want other computers in my office to have access to these applications using a domain name. We have a LAN network with static IPs. I can access these applications from other computers using the ip address of the server but i want to use names like "abc.example.com". All the other computers are running Windows and I am running Linux Ubuntu 8.04 on the server. Im just looking for a simple setup because I dont have a lot of computers. I tried doing the following (if anyone is familiar with MaraDNS):

I installed MaraDNS and tried to set up an authoritative DNS server. I followed the instructions and configured the mararc file to contain the following four lines:
csv2 = {}
csv2["automech.com."] = "crm.automech.com"
ipv4_bind_addresses = "9.0.0.114"
chroot_dir = "/etc/maradns"

And I configured the zone file crm.automech.com in the etc/maradns directory to contain just the following single line:
crm.% 9.0.0.114 ~

This does not seem to be working. I'm sorry if the question appears outright stupid. But I am completely new to networking as well as Linux. Can someone help me out with MaraDNS or offer another solution. I would be very grateful.

Thanks,
Rahul

[chipsafts]

Why not just use the DNS server that came with the Linux you installed?

do the other pc's know to use the MARAdns to lookup?

[raul_bhatia]

Hey,
I dont think the Linux came with any DNS server. I installed bind9 and tried to set up that too. But that doesnt seem to work either. The other computers dont know to use maraDNS....but using maraDNS, I cant even access the applications from the server itself using the name instead of the ip address.

Please help me....I've already spent two days on this. Maybe I'm just missing something. I'm a complete Linux noob.

[falko]

I'd use BIND or MyDNS. You can find tutorials about both in the DNS category: http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/dns

[raul_bhatia]

Thanks guys! I finally got BIND9 to work. Now I can access my server from other computers on my network.
But there is still one more problem. I have multiple applications running on this server and I want to use different names to access all these aplications. For example: I set up my domain name as example.net and i have SugarCRM and Zenoss installed on the linux server. Now how do i edit the zone files to access the two applications as crm.example.net and zenoss.example.net respectively?

Thanks a lot for all your help!

[chipsafts]

webmin will help you with this.

the same zone file that has your current name can also take the additional names. for instance:
fones.abcdefg.com. IN A 192.168.1.200

[raul_bhatia]

Hi guys,

Thanks for all your help. I finally got it to work. 'm posting my solution here because think what I did is a really good way to set up an intranet network with DNS.

I installed BIND9 and got all the settings to work. Created two zone files. One for my network and the other for reverse mapping. Made sure that the zone files were in the same folder as listed in the directory option in the named.conf.options file. The zone files contained records of the name of the host and the ip address. For example if i wanted to name the application I was viewing as crm, I created a record as:
crm A IN IPaddress

Thats about all that was to be done to configure Bind. The rest of the configuration is pretty much the same as is shown on the a number of websites.

The next step was to create virtual hosts for Apache. This helped me to have different names for different applications running on the same server. I created a IP based virtual host with the server name as crm.yourdomain.

Similarly to creat multiple names. Just create more entries in your zone files with the same IP address but different names. Then make a virtual host in Apache for every different name.

Thats it! Hope this helps anyone who is looking to solve a similar problem in the future.
Thanks again!