DNS part of the manual

[Leo Hauptmann]

I tried installing and configuring stuff using the FreeBSD manual as my
primary source of information. Generally the manual has been superb in that
but now I found the two chapters about DNS and Bind9 confusing. Although
these chapters are not supposed to be complete handbooks about the covered
topics I feel they do not cover the basics.

The "26.7 BIND9 and FreeBSD" contains how to configure master zone and start
the daemon. Then I'll have to go back to "26.6 Domain Name System (DNS)" for
the rest of the basic configuration. That chapter has got lots of
information. It contains some basic terminology, concepts and configuration
situations. Then sandboxing which I understood is automatically done with
Bind9?

What I was expecting was solid basic case: "How to build basic configuration
for running example.org authoritative DNS out of scratch". As far as I can
see some things on that track are not covered at all even as quick'n'dirty.
Like creating initial zone files for my "example.org". Instead of that the
manual goes through the configuration file - which is mostly very well
commented all by itself already.

Also what I was wondering about was how to enable ddns. Okay, it's not that
hard. Basically it goes like: Add the key to the dhcpd and tell it where the
Bind is. Tell the Bind the key and enable the dynamic updates. What I quite
honestly couldn't figure out with some 60 minutes of Googling was how to get
the dhcp client to send the hostname. I found some methods but they used the
encryption key at the client too. It's not frankly very approach if you've
got lots of clients (desktops for instance). Then - what is the minimal
dynamic zone's zone file like?

What I was after was two very basic and simple cases. Not throughoutly
explained but in a way that it would work[tm] and there could be after that
the "study more from these and these resources". 1-4 pages of solid
instructions. The cases being "Taking a minimal installation of FreeBSD,
enabling and configuring Bind to handle authoritatively the example.org" and
"enabling ddns for this example.org, including basic configuration of dhcpd,
bind, and the dhcp-client and the zone". Not for-complete-dummies, but
enough to get started.

Especially finding good information about this ddns was quite hard. Lot's of
documents refer to different methods, special cases, software versions (such
as different dhcp clients) and so on. I would offer to help with the manual
(in case anyone feels the DNS chapters should be revised) but as I couldn't
figure out and get working everything, .. lol. sigh.