Don't need a cure for insomnia

March 27, 2008 6:39 AM

Need recommendations for an everyman's guide to the DNS system thats readable yet thorough.

I've recently promoted myself to boss of my own tinterweb services company, which is great on the whole However I've come to realise that my sysadmin skills could do with some polish and one of the areas thats lacking is my understanding of DNS and IP routing.

Any suggestions for a book / course / online resource that could help me make sense of it all? I do *nix and windows, which complicates things no end.

Ultimately certification would be a bonus, but I'm not sure if I want to put myself through another MCP right now.. their just so ... dull!

posted by whoojemaflip to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

The DNS & bind O'Reilly book is good reading for understanding DNS (and a handy reference if you intend to use bind). I also found the relevent RFCs to be quite readable if you're curious about protocol level details.
posted by cmonkey at 6:51 AM on March 27, 2008

I tend to have a hard time learning from books, so I picked up most of what I know about DNS from setting up my own DNS server from scratch. It took a while, but really helped me get a grasp on what was going on. I used DJBDNS, which separates out some tasks that bind conflates. Unfortunately, it's sparsely documented and generally hard to deal with. But then, I heard bind isn't much better. Either way, you're in for some pretty tricky work.
posted by heresiarch at 7:17 AM on March 27, 2008

While I'm by no means an expert on the subject, I have found that my account with www.zonedit.com provides adequate documentation to give me a basic understanding of the system. It's not exactly what you're looking for per se, but it may be a start...and it's free.
posted by AltReality at 7:23 AM on March 27, 2008