Hello all.

Being the Linux n00b that I am, and this being LinuxQuestions.org, I have a question about DNS.

I've been looking around on the net and in readmes and so on that I can find, but there are just some things I can't make sense of.

Could someone please tell me or give me some links in laments terms, as I suck at anything too technical, what the following are, and what theie function is.

A Records
CNAME Records
HINFO Records

Thanks.

Hi
I have to configure DNS server too, and till now, I know that
A record is like the main thing, MX - for mail, CNAME - some stupid one, thats rarely used.
Good luck
Kaloian

Belize, that wasn't exactly helpful...

Any way:
A record = name to IP mapping, i.e. give it a name and it resolves to an IP
CNAME = name to name mapping, point one record to another of a different name
HINFO = host information, i.e. information about the host--rarely used

Could someone please tell me what the following are, or what the difference is between them?

Slave Zone
Stub Zone
Forward Zone
Root Zone

Muchly appreciated.

Jason.

Slave Zone == Zone that gets pulled from another server.
Stub Zone == Rarely used nowadays, sort of similar to a slave zone.
Forward Zone == Zone that forwards to another server.
Root Zone == the root servers (IE: the dot in .com, .net, .org).

Other handy terminology:

Root: the dot between domain and TLD.
top level domain: (TLD) com, net, org, edu, mil, gov
domain: yahoo, msn, google
sub-domain: www, mail, ftp


Authoritative Nameserver: the Nameserver that handles requests for the domain for the internet (note that this is not always where changes actually happen, often times the authoritative name servers are also slaves to a central server somewhere where an admin actually does the changes.)

Master == the NS that the admin actually changes records on.
Slave == An NS that pulls from the master server.

TTL: time to live, how long a nameserver should keep the record in it's cache.
PTR: reverse dns host record for an IP. (IE: 127.0.0.1 PTR is localhost)
MX: the host that handles mail
INFO: (Rarely used, but can be entertaining) text about a host

Ahh, so in my ISP's case, 210.55.12.1 is the Master Server and 210.55.12.2 is the Slave? And all the Slave is, is a backup (to put it loosely) of the Master?

I think I get it now. lol.

Soon, I shall arrise from the ranks of n00b!
hehe.

Thanks for your help.

One little comment on the post of MrMud.
The root is not the dot between domain and top level domain, but rather the dot that should be placed at the very end. This is not of importance when surfing since the browser adds it for us, but when setting up zone files this little dot is extremely important and sometimes a bit confusing.
so it should be www.linuxquestions.com. if we would write it correctly.

By ending with a dot we tell that this is an absolute name address, much like /bin is absolute bur bin is not.

Yep, ugge has a very important point, I was just going to post the same thing! "Root" is the right-most period (dot).

Also, www, ftp, mail, etc are usually considered "host names". Sub-domains would be like this:
state.az.us, where "az" is a sub-domain of "us" and "state" is a sub-domain of "az". email.state.az.us would be a host name.

Perhaps, but not necessarily. In fact, .1 could be the slave and .2 the master, or they could both be masters, or they could both be slaves and the real master Name Server for your ISP's zones could be an internal machine with a non-routeable IP.

The master/slave relationship is one that is only relevant to the hostmaster, not to the outside world. It just has to do with how they get updates. If they're listed as DNS servers for your ISP, then they're both "authoritative", and that's all that matters to the outside world.