How to install and minimally configure Knot to act as your home lab's local domain master and slave servers.
If you were a regular viewer of the original Saturday Night Live era, you will remember the Festrunks, two lewd but naïve Czech brothers who were self-described "wild and crazy guys!" For me, Gyorg and Yortuk (plus having my binomial handed to me by tests designed by a brilliant Czech professor at the local university's high-school mathematics contests) were the extent of my knowledge of the Czech Republic.
I recently discovered something else Czech, and it's not wild and crazy at all, but quite tame and sane, open-source and easy to configure. Knot DNS is an authoritative DNS server written in 2011 by the Czech CZ.NIC organization. They wrote and continue to maintain it to serve their national top-level domain (TLD) as well as to prevent further extension of a worldwide BIND9 software monoculture across all TLDs. Knot provides a separate fast caching server and resolver library alongside its authoritative server.
Authoritative nameserver and caching/recursive nameserver functions are separated for good reason. A nameserver's query result cache can be "poisoned" by queries that forward to malicious external servers, so if you don't allow the authoritative nameserver to answer queries for other domains, it cannot be poisoned and its answers for its own domain can be trusted.
A software monoculture means running identical software like BIND9 everywhere rather than different software providing identical functionality and interoperability. This is bad for the same reasons we eventually will lose our current popular species of banana—being genetically identical, all bananas everywhere can be wiped out by a single infectious agent. As with fruit, a bit of genetic diversity in critical infrastructure is a good thing.
In this article, I describe how to install and minimally configure Knot to act as your home lab's local domain master and slave servers. I will secure zone transfer using Transaction Signatures (TSIG). Although Knot supports DNSSEC, I don't discuss it here, because I like you and want you to finish reading before we both die of old age. I assume you already know what a DNS zone file is and what it looks like.
from Linux Journal - The Original Magazine of the Linux Community http://bit.ly/2JDUkLe
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