DNS resolvers setup/installation ?

Hi all !

A basic but a tricky question though [atleast for me ]

Ok, here it goes, we all use DNS resolvers on our servers, local machine, etc. They are necessary for resolving the domain names, etc.

OpenDNS is one of the free DNS resolver providers, I use it as for now.

Well, what I want is, to have my own DNS resolvers. ie: I don't want to use my ISPs or any other DNS providers' resolvers, but mine. Such that I can put them in the DNS settings [/etc/resolv.conf] & use them directly.

Can someone please guide me through the exact process required into this? Also, what sort of hardware is required into such a setup?

Any help/assistance would be much appreciated. Thank you,

You are confusing 2 different parts of the system. The resolver is the local part (the DNS client), which tries different ways to resolve an human memorable name to an IP address. One of these ways is to ask a DNS server, like OpenDNS or an locally installed DNS server (which itself acts like a resolver if it doesn't know the mapping already).

To run your own DNS server, you'll (primarily) need 2 things: a server machine that has a public IP, and the DNS server software (eg. BIND), the latter of which has to be configured properly.

Thing is, if you run your own DNS server, it'll still have to ask other servers for mappings it doesn't know (either because it's never heard of it before, or because the caching time expired).

Thank you for your help & information. I'm getting closer to my goal now :slight_smile: The last para mentions that the DNS server needs to have caching enabled. I've installed djbdns now & have enabled the caching name servers as well. Anything more I can do further? Thank for you for any information you can give :slight_smile: Cheers !