From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 11 19: 5:57 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from laurasia.com.au (lauras.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.93.142]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6D8A514ECE for ; Thu, 11 Nov 1999 19:05:49 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mike@laurasia.com.au) Received: (from mike@localhost) by laurasia.com.au (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id LAA09091; Fri, 12 Nov 1999 11:21:18 +0800 (WST) From: Michael Kennett Message-Id: <199911120321.LAA09091@laurasia.com.au> Subject: Re: DNS & virtual hosting the hard way In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991111214558.009489f0@mail.udel.edu> from John at "Nov 11, 99 09:50:50 pm" To: papalia@UDel.Edu (John) Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 11:21:17 +0800 (WST) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL32 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Hey all... > > I'm not sure how to phrase my question correctly, so please bear with me. > > Right now, I'm running a box off the university system in my apartment - > static IP. I was looking to register a few domain names (so that I'll have > them when I need them in a couple of months). As it stands right now, the > university's DNS tables have me in as students157-57.udel.edu. If I got a > domain name, the unversity has no problem with me having it point to my > box, but they will not modify/add to their existing DNS tables. My > understanding is that that would have to happen in order for foo.bar (or > whatever the domain is) to point to my box. > > Is there any other way around that? For example, could I set up my own > DNS, add myself to the list, and then would it propagate? > > I'm not sure if this question is clear or not, so please ask me to rephrase > or provide more info is necessary. Hi John, AFAIK, you're not really asking about `virtual' hosting. Indeed, it seems to me that what you want to do can be accomplished by setting up your machine with DNS (check out man named (8), and /usr/share/doc/smm/10.named). With DNS, there need to be (at least) two machines that contain records for the foo.bar domain. Both of these machines should be available *all* the time (24 hours each day). You'd also need to find a friend/associate who is prepared to act as a `secondary' DNS server for your domain name. Finally, once you have a DNS server setup, the name will propagate out to the world. This propagation is controlled by the `expiry' time parameter in the DNS records -- if you set the expiry time to 4 weeks, you can't change (radically!) your setup the next day. Every 4 weeks the non-authorit- ative DNS servers will flush out (expire) the foo.bar domain records, and refetch them (when demanded) from an authoritative source. So yes, if you set up your own DNS, it would propagate! Have Fun, Mike Kennett (mike@laurasia.com.au) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message