BIND

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BIND (or named) is the most widely used Domain Name System (DNS) server.

Note: The organization developing BIND is serving security notices to paying customers up to four days before Linux distributions or the general public.[1]

Installation

Install the bind package.

Start/enable the named.service systemd unit.

To use the DNS server locally, use the 127.0.0.1 nameserver (meaning clients like Firefox resolve via 127.0.0.1), see Domain name resolution. This will however require you to #Allow recursion while a firewall might block outside queries to your local named.

Configuration

BIND is configured in /etc/named.conf. The available options are documented in named.conf(5).

Reload the named.service unit to apply configuration changes.

Restrict access to localhost

BIND by defaults listens on port 53 of all interfaces and IP addresses. To only allow connections from localhost add the following line to the options section in /etc/named.conf:

listen-on { 127.0.0.1; };

Set up DNS forwarding

To make BIND forward DNS queries to another DNS server add the forwarders clause to the options section.

Example to make BIND forward to the Google DNS servers:

forwarders { 8.8.8.8; 8.8.4.4; };

A configuration template for running a domain

Following is a simple home nameserver being set up, using domain.tld as the domain being served world-wide like this wiki's archlinux.org domain is.

A more elaborate example is DNS server with BIND9, while this shows how to set up internal network name resolution.

Creating a zonefile

Create /var/named/domain.tld.zone.

$TTL 7200
; domain.tld
@       IN      SOA     ns01.domain.tld. postmaster.domain.tld. (
                                        2018111111 ; Serial
                                        28800      ; Refresh
                                        1800       ; Retry
                                        604800     ; Expire - 1 week
                                        86400 )    ; Negative Cache TTL
                IN      NS      ns01
                IN      NS      ns02
ns01            IN      A       0.0.0.0
ns02            IN      A       0.0.0.0
localhost       IN      A       127.0.0.1
@               IN      MX 10   mail
imap            IN      CNAME   mail
smtp            IN      CNAME   mail
@               IN      A       0.0.0.0
www             IN      A       0.0.0.0
mail            IN      A       0.0.0.0
@               IN      TXT     "v=spf1 mx"

$TTL defines the default time-to-live in seconds for all record types. Here it is 2 hours.

Serial must be incremented manually before restarting named every time you change a resource record for the zone. Otherwise slaves will not re-transfer the zone: they only do it if the serial is greater than that of the last time they transferred the zone.

Configuring master server

Add your zone to /etc/named.conf:

zone "domain.tld" IN {
        type master;
        file "domain.tld.zone";
        allow-update { none; };
        notify no;
};

Reload the named.service unit to apply the configuration change.

Allow recursion

If you are running your own DNS server, you might as well use it for all DNS lookups, or even locally serve the root-zone yourself following RFC:7706. The former will require the ability to do recursive lookups. In order to prevent DNS Amplification Attacks, recursion is turned off by default for most resolvers. The default Arch /etc/named.conf file allows for recursion only on the loopback interface:

allow-recursion { 127.0.0.1; };

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: LAN networking is not recursive. (Discuss in Talk:BIND)

If you want to provide name service for your local network; e.g. 192.168.0.0/24, you must add the appropriate range of IP addresses to /etc/named.conf:

allow-recursion { 192.168.0.0/24; 127.0.0.1; };

Configuring BIND to serve DNSSEC signed zones

DNSSEC validation is enabled by default. Do not forget to check that "edns" is not disabled.

On master DNS server:

generate KSK and ZSK keys:

 $ dnssec-keygen -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 2048 -n ZONE example.com
 $ dnssec-keygen -f KSK -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 4096 -n ZONE example.com

change zone configuration:

 zone "example.com" {
       type master;
       allow-transfer { ... };
       auto-dnssec maintain;
       inline-signing yes;
       key-directory "master/";
       file "master/example.com.zone";
 };

Now bind will sign zone automatically. (This example assumes that all required files are in /var/named/master/)

Then you should pass DS records (from dsset-example.com. file) to parent zone owner probably using your registrar website. It glues parent zone with your KSK.

KSK (and corresponding DS records) should be changed rarely because it needs manual intervention, ZSK can be changed more often because this key is usually shorter to be faster in signature checking.

You can schedule old ZSK key expiration and generate new one using:

 $ dnssec-settime -I +172800 -D +345600 Kexample.com.+000+111111.key
 $ dnssec-keygen -S Kexample.com.+000+111111.key -i 152800

Bind should automatically use new ZSK key at appropriate time.

Automatically listen on new interfaces

By default bind scan for new interfaces and stop listening on interfaces which no longer exist every hour. You can tune this value by adding :

interface-interval <rescan-timeout-in-minutes>;

parameter into named.conf options section. Max value is 28 days. (40320 min)
You can disable this feature by setting its value to 0.

Then restart the service.

Running BIND in a chrooted environment

Running in a chroot environment is not required but improves security.

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: /srv/ is an odd place for chroots, /var/lib/ would be a more common place. (Discuss in Talk:BIND)

Creating the jail house

In order to do this, we first need to create a place to keep the jail, we shall use /srv/named, and then put the required files into the jail.

# mkdir -p /srv/named/{dev,etc,usr/lib/engines,var/{run,log,named}}

Copy over required system files:

# cp -av /etc/{localtime,named.conf} /srv/named/etc/
# cp -av /usr/lib/engines-1.1/* /srv/named/usr/lib/engines/
# cp -av /var/named/* /srv/named/var/named/.

Set up required dev nodes:

# mknod /srv/named/dev/null c 1 3
# mknod /srv/named/dev/random c 1 8

Set ownership of the files:

# chown -R named:named /srv/named

This should create the required file system for the jail.

Service unit

Next we need to create the new service file which will allow force bind into the chroot

# cp -av /usr/lib/systemd/system/named.service /etc/systemd/system/named-chroot.service

we need to edit how the service calls bind.

/etc/systemd/system/named-chroot.service

ExecStart=/usr/bin/named -4 -f -u named -t "/srv/named"

Now, reload systemd systemctl daemon-reload, and start the named-chroot.service.