I’m assuming a platform of Fedora Core 4 (soon to be updated to Fedora Core 5 as I write).
You should understand that DNS is a distributed database. When you build a “real” DNS server, you will be participating in a heirarchy of DNS servers.
MASSIVE CAUTION: DNS servers are very dangerous. You must be aware of issues such as cache poisoning, update forgeries and more. See the Bind 9 Administrative Reference: /usr/share/doc/bind-9.2.2/arm/BvARM.html (update the version number as necessary).
Initially, however, you will build a “caching-only” name server. This is an extremely basic introduction to bind, as a starting point for further study or for building an evaluation installation of Fedora (Red Hat) Directory Server. However, we will discuss the basics of bind setup along the way.
The top level domain is the root server, represented by a dot: ” . “
Below that lie .com, .org, .net etc.
Typical domains use at least two DNS servers: a Primary (or Master) Name Server, and a Secondary (Slave) Name Server. Servers are set up in the NS RR records in the /etc/named.conf file; the order of authority is called delegation.
There are also Caching Name Servers, which accept info from primary servers and hold it until it expires, or Forwarding Name Servers, which are essentially proxy servers for clients behind a firewall.
Ronald (Ron) Aitchison’s excellent book Pro DNS and BIND:
Installation – http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch5/#fc2
A caching-only DNS server sample configuration file – http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch6/#caching