[Techtalk] bind question

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Maria,

On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, Maria McKinley wrote:

> > If reverse mapping is really important to you, don't use split 
> > horizon. You will never get 100% reliable results. Use an internal 
> > hostname to map to an internal IP, and use the "search" option in 
> > /etc/resolv.conf to search the internal domain instead of the external 
> > one.
> > 
> 
> Hmm, not sure how I feel about this strategy. It would mean changing a 
> hell of a lot of configs on a whole lot of machines.

resolv.conf should be set by DHCP on all machines, so you can supply the 
search setting by configuring your DHCP server.

> Not to mention having to get a bunch of people use to the concept of 
> using different hostnames depending on where they are.

DNS caches will mess you up when people move hosts from inside to outside 
the network (think jumping on a 3G or someone else's wireless connection, 
or one outside of your DMZ).

> Have to think about that. Might prefer to remake the /etc/hosts file for 
> all the machines that this is important for, although that is hardly 
> ideal either...

Might work too. You can use rdist etc. to distribute /etc/hosts 
automatically. But still a problem for machines which change networks, and 
still means conflicting DNS databases which is a bad idea imho (leads to 
infinite confusion).

You could always nat your public IPs back to private ones for internal 
users at your firewall, so people can still ping/ssh sarah.shadlen.org 
(using its public IP) on the internal network and it will just work (tm).

Cheers, Chris.
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