Mac DNS Admin Guide

1 MacDNS 1.0.3 Administrator’s Guide About This Guide This guide describes how to install, set up, and use MacDNS software. The guide also provides details about the Domain Name System. This guide is provided to you in Adobe™ Acrobat format. You can view the entire guide on-screen; you can also print the document to have a hard- copy version available as a convenient reference. Who should read this guide This guide is intended for administrators of MacDNS servers. The guide assumes you are an administrator of a small- to medium-sized Internet site and that you are running the MacDNS software on a PowerPC™–based Internet Server from Apple Computer. What you need to know You don’t need to have prior knowledge of the Domain Name System (DNS) to use the MacDNS program or to understand this guide. The guide does assume you have some familiarity with the Internet and internetworking concepts. If you want to learn about the Domain Name System, you can read the appendix to this guide, which provides details about how DNS works. You can also refer to the resources described in “For More Information” later in this section. 2 Balloon Help The MacDNS Administrator’s Guide provides you with all the details you’ll need to set up and use the MacDNS software. If you’re using the MacDNS software and you have a question about an item you see in the interface, you can use Balloon Help to provide you with on-screen information about that item. To turn on MacDNS Balloon Help, choose Show Balloons from the Help menu (the question mark in the upper-right corner of the menu bar at the top of your screen). To turn off Balloon Help, choose Hide Balloons from the Help menu. For more information If you want to know more about DNS than the information provided in the appendix of this guide, there are several publicly available books and documents that may be helpful: DNS and BIND. 1992. Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu. Published by O’Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol, California. Though much of this retail book is devoted to explaining BIND, a program for the UNIX® operating system, this book has a good overview of the history and function of the Domain Name System. “Domain Names—Concepts and Facilities.” 1987. Paul Mockapetris. RFC 1034; available at http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1034.txt. Provides technical details about the Domain Name System. “Domain Names—Implementation and Specification.” 1987. Paul Mockapetris. RFC 1035; available at http://ds.internic.net/rfc/ rfc1035.txt. Provides technical details about the Domain Name System. “DNS Encoding of Network Names and Other Types.” 1989. Paul Mockapetris. 1989. RFC 1101; available at http://ds.internic.net/rfc/ rfc1101.txt. Provides technical details about the Domain Name System. The following URLs may als…