Bind9 DNS help with psuedo domains

Question

I have setup a dns server on my home network to manage some apps that I have written for home.

Currently I have 3 "domains" that I am using: controller devserver fileserver

The first issue that I am having is that when I attempt to ping the parent domain of any of these 3 I am unable to. I simply get ping: unknown host controller. I however can ping any of the subdomains I have setup for these 3 parent domains.

The second issue is I am unable to ping any of the 3 parent domains or any child domains from my window machines. I have verified that these domains work on other devices in my house (ipod touch, ipad, cell phone).

Any help with this is greatly appreciated

Here is bind data file for my parent domain controller:

;
; BIND data file for local loopback interface
;
$TTL 604800
@ IN SOA controller. admin.controller. (
9
604800
86400
2419200
604800 )
;
@  IN NS controller.
@  IN A 192.168.1.104
controller  IN A 192.168.1.194
admin.controller. IN A 192.168.1.104

Answer 1

It's really hard to troubleshoot without seeing your complete config, but your setup seems all over the place and I am not sure if this is intentional.

@ IN NS controller. @ IN A 192.168.1.104 controller IN A 192.168.1.194 admin.controller. IN A 192.168.1.104

Mssing a "." at the end of the hostname would append the domain name to your host entries, so controller would become controller.admin.controller.. Is that intentional?

Here is the correct configuration that works. Pay attention to the second entry in SOA. hostmaster.domain.com This supposed to be a hostmaster EMAIL and will be interpreted as hostmaster@domain.com, not as a hostname.

$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA  dns0.domain.com. hostmaster.domain.com. (
   2009101301 ; Serial
   3600  ; Retry every hour
   1W  ; Expire
   86400  ; TTL is 1 day
)
;
; Name Server Records
;
   IN NS dns0.domain.com.
   IN NS dns1.domain.com.
;
; Host Addresses
;
localhost  IN A 127.0.0.1
www   IN A 192.168.1.124
domain.com.         IN A 192.168.1.124

Answer 2

post the named.conf file as that will tell us what the @ symbol in your zone file means. You appear to have something else defined for @ at 192.168.1.104 that is not equal to "controller"

Secondly, the server acting as the DNS server, do the clients refer to it as their DNS primary?

Since this is Bind, I assume this is Unix or Linux. Just for completeness post your /etc/resolv.conf file too.

All in all the zone file looks correct syntactically but I think I detect a problem within named.conf for how this zone file is referenced and I think that is throwing off the @ substitution.

Answer 3

Here is my named.conf and my named.conf.local

named.conf:

// This is the primary configuration file for the BIND DNS server named.
//
// Please read /usr/share/doc/bind9/README.Debian.gz for information on the 
// structure of BIND configuration files in Debian, *BEFORE* you customize 
// this configuration file.
//
// If you are just adding zones, please do that in /etc/bind/named.conf.local

include "/etc/bind/named.conf.options";
include "/etc/bind/named.conf.local";
include "/etc/bind/named.conf.default-zones";

named.conf.local

//
// Do any local configuration here
//

// Consider adding the 1918 zones here, if they are not used in your
// organization
//include "/etc/bind/zones.rfc1918";

zone "controller" {
    type master;
    file "/etc/bind/zones/controller";
    };

I have modified my /etc/bind/zones/controller file to be similar to the one that solefald posted, but I am still have the same issues.