Adding DNS A records

[adrianTNT]

Hello, I have Fedora Core 8 and I want to host multiple domains using same dedicated IP address.
On my domain registar I set the NS to ns1.myserver.com ns2.myserver.com
I know that my domain needs an "A" record in order to be associated with my server.
I have some questions...

1. Where do I add the DNS "A" record on my server files? Is it /etc/named.conf ?
2. Any other file to edit?
3. Does server needs restart whenever I edit named.conf?
4. Is this correct format of an "A" record that is added?

zone "domain1.com" {
        type master;
        file "domain1.com";
        allow-transfer {
                my.ip.address.here;
                common-allow-transfer;
        };
};

Thanks in advance.
- Adrian.

[HSHAssociates]

All you have added is a zone to the named.conf THat is not an A record.

Look in the options section for the options for the directory variable, and look in there for the file you need to edit.
Add the A record in this format:

www.yourdomain.com. A 192.169.0.100

(You need a trailing . on a FQN, and substitute your ip addy and domain name for your setup)

[adrianTNT]

on a server where I have domains added the options area of /etc/named.conf looks like this:

options {
        allow-recursion {
                localnets;
        };
        directory "/var";
        auth-nxdomain no;
        pid-file "/var/run/named/named.pid";
};

// and here are zones formated as in my first post

I cannot locate the format you mentioned. Is it another file than /etc/named.conf? I seen that line format that you mentioned somewhere but don't know in what file.

[HSHAssociates]

It looks like the file domain1.com is located directly in the /var directory, if the options statement in your named.conf is correct. look for domain1.com and post the contents.

[adrianTNT]

I could do it by adding this:

in /etc/named.conf:

zone "domain1.com" IN {
        type master;
        file "domain1.com";
        allow-update { none; };
};

created /var/named-chroot/var/named/domain1.com:

$TTL    86400

@       IN      SOA     domain1.com. other.other.com. (
                        1997022700      ; Serial
                        10800   ; Refresh
                        3600    ; Retry
                        604800  ; Expire
                        10800 ) ; Minimum

domain1.com.              IN NS   208.109.209.186
domain1.com.              IN A    208.109.209.186
www.domain1.com.          IN CNAME        domain1.com.

domain1.com loads ok in browser now.
But...

Is there a way to simplify this? I don't know if adding the zone was needed or not.
Ideally I would like it to work for any domain so that I dont have to do this for all my domains. Is there a way?

[HSHAssociates]

Of course you need to add the zone.

You could get cpanel or plesk and do it through a gui inerface, but if you are going to be a sysadmin, these are some of the files you will have to create and maintain...
I do this for a couple of hundred domains, and it takes less than a minute to add a new zone.

[adrianTNT]

I will use this server as my own parking server and I will add few hundreds domains.
Maybe you know a good way to dynamically create these files?
Or I am thinking about redirecting the files to my server html root and create the files there by PHP.
Do you have hundreds of files inside /var/named-chroot/var/named/ for each domain?

[HSHAssociates]

I have one file per domain. Basically, when I create a new domain, I just copy olddomain.com to newdomain.com, and use a search and replace script to change the name (and ip address if necessary). Then I add an entry in the named.conf, rndc reload and away it goes. If you are running a slave server on another machine, you have to update the named.conf on the slave server as well. Same with my httpd.conf file. I use a vhosts.conf that I include at the end of httpd.conf, and add a virtual domain in there.