Archive for June 16th, 2010

How to install djbdns local caching DNS server on Debian Lenny Linux

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

You might wonder why somebody would choose to install http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html djbdns in favour of the much more popular and established bind name server.
Well I personally have the following major concernes, when I do the conscious choice to install djbdns.

– DjbDNS is fast caching DNS, according to some online tests it is sometimes at least twice faster in resolving addresses compared to bind.
– Djbdns caching server is easy to set up
– DjbDNS is Secure. It’s notable that Dan Bernstein the author of djbdns is one of the most honoured security specialists and hackers out there. Dan Bernstein is also the author of the qmail email server which is currently considered the most secure MTA in the world.
– DjbDNS is small in size compared to bind, takes less system resources (though this is not a crucial difference).
– DjbDNS occupies less system memory than bind

1. Install DjbDNS via apt-get

debian-server:~# apt-get install djbdns

This will also install daemontools – which will instlal daemontools and the daemontools-run package which will add necessery entries to /etc/inittab in order to enable service supervision through daemontools.

2. Add Necessery users for the djbdns local caching server to be ready to launchg:


debian-server:~# groupadd dnscache
debian-server:~# useradd -g dnscache dnscache
debian-server:~# useradd -g dnscache dnslog
debian-server:~# dnscache-conf dnscache dnslog /var/dnscache

3. Configure and install djbdns local caching server files instance

debian-server:~# dnscache-conf dnscache dnslog /var/dnscache

4. Last but not least it’s necessery to setup dnscache to start up automatically via daemontools’s svscanboot program

debian-server:~# ln -s /var/dnscache /etc/service

If you want to further dig into the nice djbdns caching linux/bsd server then be sure to checkout djbdnksrocks’s website
Now to start using the newly configured DNS caching server on localhost add to your /etc/resolv.conf


echo 'nameserver 127.0.0.1' >> /etc/resolv.conf