Concise Guide to DNS and BIND, The

In a Simple Network

The basic principle you'll rely on is that a DNS server that receives a query will answer the query if it knows the answer. Thus, by merely setting up BIND with your zone and no root.hints, you have a working DNS service your DNS clients can use. The normal root.hints file is, of course, useless inside your closed network. For redundancy, you then can set up secondary servers for your zone in the normal manner, but also without a root.hints file. In a simple scenario in a simple company, this is all you must do.

Harmless Error Messages When you drop the root.hints file, you get errors about it being missing and messages such as sysquery: nlookup error on ?. These are all harmless and can be safely ignored.

If you're not ...