Questions[dns-server](server)

We have Linux boxes with static IP, some using Centos and other Debian, using IP ranges reserved for development and testing.

We need this boxes to 'publish' their DNS into DNS Server 2008R2, without administrator nor manual intervention.

These hosts has their hostname properly configured, but they don't register themselves to the DNS, so I cannot access them with their hostname.

On a windows box, this process is automatic and you can force re-registration with ipconfig /registerdns. Do we have equivalent for the Linux family?

The idea is to make these hosts to automatically add an entry for themselves on the DNS server so I can access them using their hostname.

RFC 2136 `Dynamic Updates in the Domain Name System (DNS UPDATE)' defines the protocol.

I've got a network with 3 AD servers that also run the DNS service.

We've got a project on to migrate from Windows DNS to a new turnkey DDI solution.

I'm going through everything I can think of and manually changing its DNS client configuration to point at the new IP addresses of the new servers.

What I want to do is convert the original 3 AD/DNS servers into Forward Only servers so they send all queries to the new DNS servers, and log the inbound queries to them (so I can figure out what still needs to be changed).

I've not been able to find instructions on converting a Windows DNS server to only forward and not actually resolve queries itself.

It's a production system, so I've got to be careful about what I do to it. - for example, I can't change the IP address of the DC's.

Any ideas?

I have defined an unbound DNS server on my VPS and it appears to work. I need to use the DNS server instead of public DNS servers because some ISPs have blocked public DNS IPs. My openvpn.conf file is:

    dev tun
    proto tcp

    # Notice: here I set the listening port to be 80 to avoid possible port blockage
    port 80

    ca /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/keys/ca.crt
    cert /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/keys/server.crt
    key /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/keys/server.key
    dh /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/2.0/keys/dh1024.pem

    user nobody
    group nogroup
    server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0

    persist-key
    persist-tun

    #status openvpn-status.log
    #verb 3
    client-to-client

    push "redirect-gateway def1"

    #pushing public DNS IPs

    push "dhcp-option DNS 208.67.222.222"
    push "dhcp-option DNS 208.67.222.220"

    comp-lzo

As it is suggested here, I tried to use my server's IPs (say 11.22.33.44). So instead of

    push "dhcp-option DNS 208.67.222.222"
    push "dhcp-option DNS 208.67.222.220"

I just put

push "dhcp-option DNS 11.22.33.44"

In openvpn.conf above. However, after restarting openvpn, I see that my client can still connect to the OpenVPN server but no pages can be rendered anymore.

What can be wrong here? How can I solve this problem?

Outlook and a number of other email clients now feature autodiscovery of mail server settings and it bugs me that I don't have this set up for our domains, but I'm not sure how to do it and a quick google hasn't turned up anything. I presume it's done with some kind of SRV record in DNS - is this correct and if so what's the correct format?

In DNS an SRV record really is a pretty generic form of telling a remote client where a specific service is hosted. At this moment I use it for allowing people to call me using a SIP client over the internet (works quite nicely).

One of the advantages of the SRV record is that you can specify a different port for the service and you can have multiple systems for the same (or the same system and multiple instances on a different port). So IFF it works you can have several webservers on a single system without any interferences.

So you could have this in your DNS:

_http._tcp SRV 10 50 8080 myserver.basjes.nl
_http._tcp SRV 10 50 8081 myserver.basjes.nl

There is however one tiny snag to all this goodness ... I've not been able to find any HTTP, FTP, SMTP, ... clients that support it.

So other than SIP and the few other protocols mentioned in the Wikipedia page: Will the SRV record ever become really useful?

Or have I missed something?

Is there something better out there that does work?