BIND9 local zone (LAN pc's)

[anvar]

Hello,

I have a little question about setting up a local DNS zone for my internal network.

Situation:
I want to drop my windows dns box so I installed a Debian Linux 5.0 on a ALIX board (Voyage Linux) and that box I've installed bind9 & webmin (easy GUI)
Now in webmin I configure my outside dns zones for a loopback, example: mail.domainname.com resolves to the local ip of the mailserver. I don't use mailforwarders. And all of these functions work fine.

Now I want to set up my local pc/servers their hostname in bind9
So I've created a new masterzone with the workgroup name I use homenetwork.local, in this zone I've created my hosts and everything works fine. But I also want to connect/ping to a host without typing his full dns name.
So my 1stserver must also be accessible with "1stserver" in stead off "1stserver.homenetwork.local"

Can someone help me out with this,
Thanks
Thomas

[Coax]

Make sure your DHCP server hands out your domain name to your clients, in addition to the DNS info.

On linux, you can manually put "search homenetwork.local" in /etc/resolv.conf so that it will automatically look for "1stserver.homenetwork.local" when you try to connect to "1stserver".

[Gary K]

Hello,

I have a little question about setting up a local DNS zone for my internal network.

Situation:
I want to drop my windows dns box so I installed a Debian Linux 5.0 on a ALIX board (Voyage Linux) and that box I've installed bind9 & webmin (easy GUI)
Now in webmin I configure my outside dns zones for a loopback, example: mail.domainname.com resolves to the local ip of the mailserver. I don't use mailforwarders. And all of these functions work fine.

Now I want to set up my local pc/servers their hostname in bind9
So I've created a new masterzone with the workgroup name I use homenetwork.local, in this zone I've created my hosts and everything works fine. But I also want to connect/ping to a host without typing his full dns name.
So my 1stserver must also be accessible with "1stserver" in stead off "1stserver.homenetwork.local"

Can someone help me out with this,
Thanks
Thomas

If I understand your question correctly, just create a reverse-lookup zone that references the machine name not the fqdn for the different machines. I do that on my home network, and forward all name requests for domains outside my network to my ISP's nameservers, and it works fine. I can access local machines by machine name or fqdn.