RE: OT: DNS Experts out there?

["Nick Shore" <nick.shore@xxxxxxx>]

Andy,

Your entries need to be divided up, PTR records go to the owner of the IP
space.

192.168.0.1.            IN      PTR             automated.it.

but this should probably point to your mail server address, as this is the
most common
use of reverse lookups.

ie.
192.168.0.1.            IN      PTR             mail.automated.it.


Then your forward lookups go to the other provider:

normally in a file called db.automated.it, which would be added to the
server using
an entry in named.conf

zone "automated.it" {
type master;
file "db.automated.it";
};

Then the contents of db.automated.it should look like:

----------------------------------------------------
;name   ttl     class   type    origin
@               IN      SOA    ns1.somepublicdnsserver.com.
hostmaster.ns1.somepublicdnsserver.com.  (
20010405000      ; Serial
3600   ; Refresh
1200    ; Retry
604800  ; Expire
86400 ) ; Minimum
;
IN      NS      ns1.somepublicdnsserver.com.
IN      NS      ns2.somepublicdnsserver.com.

; Hosts
@		IN      A	      192.168.x.y
mail                  IN      A       192.168.x.y
www	            IN      A       192.168.x.y
camera		IN      A       192.168.x.y

; MX records
@               IN      MX       5      mail


----------------------------------------------------------
@ means this zone.

The MX record here means route any mail to x@xxxxxxx to
mail.automated.it

if you want extra matching then you can use a * record to match all single
level subdomains ie
*              IN      MX       5      mail

would match fred@xxxxxxx

or you can do it specifically
subdomain1	IN      MX       5      mail
subdomain1	IN      MX       5      mail
my.house	IN      MX       5      mail

which would provide
fred@xxxxxxx
fred@xxxxxxx
fred@xxxxxxx

etc.

Notice that I've made all the host records A records, we trend to avoid
CNAMEs at all costs, very few benefits, more hassles
when things don't work.

Normally when the zonefile is updated the server notices and sends a NOTIFY
to all DNS servers which have requested
the zone, and they then do a zone transfer.
It's not really worth fiddling with TTLs as they won't guarantee to make
anything happen much quicker, with DNS it is best
to assume that changes take about 6 hours to ripple through, sometimes as
much as 24 hours :-)

Hope that this is helpful

Nick.