FreeBSD tinydns: Sets Up a DNS Publication / Authoritative Name Server

TinyDNS is a lightweight, fast, and secure DNS server that is designed to be used as an authoritative name server. It is part of the djbdns suite of DNS tools developed by DJ Bernstein.

To set up TinyDNS as an authoritative name server on a FreeBSD system, you can follow these steps:

1. Install TinyDNS: First, you need to install TinyDNS on your FreeBSD system. You can do this by running the following command:

pkg install tinydns

This will install TinyDNS and all its dependencies.

2. Configure TinyDNS: After installing TinyDNS, you need to configure it. TinyDNS uses a configuration file named tinydns.conf to store its settings. You can edit this file to configure TinyDNS.

Here is an example of a simple tinydns.conf file that configures a domain named example.com:

.example.com:127.0.0.1:a
@example.com:127.0.0.1:a

This configuration file defines two records: an A record for the root domain example.com and an A record for the @ (wildcard) domain. Both records point to the IP address 127.0.0.1.

You can add more records to the configuration file as needed.

3. Build the data file: After configuring TinyDNS, you need to build the data file that it will use to serve DNS queries. You can do this by running the following command:

tinydns-data

This will build the data file based on the settings in the tinydns.conf file.

4. Start TinyDNS: After building the data file, you can start TinyDNS by running the following command:

tinydns

This will start TinyDNS and it will begin serving DNS queries.