DNS Name Server for Thecus NAS

Installation

The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) from the Internet Systems Consortium is the most widely used domain name server software on the Internet. You can use it to provide name services to your local network, by installing it on your Thecus NAS:

Directly after installing, the DNS server needs to be activated (enabled in the NAS administration web page). You can test the server by querying an example entry in the sample zone files that get installed along with the server. Issue the command (with your NAS' IP address, of course) either from your Unix command line, or from the Windows command shell (click "Start" and select "Run...", then enter "cmd" to start the shell). The output should look like these lines: 

user$ nslookup nenya.rings.org 192.168.222.12
Server:         192.168.222.12
Address:        192.168.222.12#53

Name:   nenya.rings.org
Address: 192.168.1.2
The sample zone files describe a (fictional) network with the domain name rings.org., comprising the hosts nenya.rings.org, vilya.rings.org, narya.rings.org, and nas.rings.org, with the IP addresses 192.168.1.2, 192.168.1.3, 192.168.1.4, and 192.168.1.1, respectively. Please choose a different (preferably your own) domain for your purpose, as this domain may get registered by somebody in the future.

Configuration

Apart from writing up the zone files, hardly any configuration is necessary to provide name services for a small network. Use the module's configuration page in the NAS administration interface to download the installed server configuration. The file is a gzipped tar archive which can be unpacked under both Unix (using tar) and Windows (for instance using WinZIP). The files use the Unix convention of terminating lines with a single line feed character, under Windows use the WordPad program to display them properly.

The tar archive contains the following files:

named.local
This file includes the zone files proper. It must contain two entries for every domain the name server is to be authoritative for: One entry points to the file containing the forward name resolution data for the domain (i.e. the mapping of DNS names to IP addresses), the other one the reverse mapping. Remember how reverse lookups are organised: A dotted quad IP address is written up reversed and padded with .in-addr.arpa to formally become a domain name with an entry in it's own zone file.
This file must always be present if a modified file is uploaded as a new configuration.
db.rings
Here the zone information for the domain rings.org. is stored. Apart from a header it contains mappings of domain names to IP addresses. Wikipedia has a good description of the zone file format.
db.rev-rings
The reverse mappings. The network corresponding to the domain rings.org. is 192.168.1.0/24. The domain for the reverse lookup therefore is 1.168.192.in-addr.arpa. To complete the IP address, in this pseudo domain only the last part of the IP address is missing, therefore the file contains a mapping of this last number of the IP address to the domain name.
named.options
This file contains options for the DNS server. The directory option must not be changed for the server to function properly. Feel free to add options.
This file must always be present if a modified file is uploaded as a new configuration.
MAGIC
This file tells the module configuration page that this is a zone file archive. Do not modify this file, and make sure to include it when you build a new configuration file.
This file therefore must always be present if a modified file is uploaded as a new configuration.
To modify the configuration, modify the files and construct a new archive, which you can upload using the module's configuration page. Under Unix, you'd choose the .tar.gz format, while under Windows the .zip format is more convenient. The module configuration page digests both formats. Of course you're free to choose different file names for the zone files (i.e. the db.* files in the sample data), but make sure the file names are entered into the named.local file so that the server can access them.

Particularly the named.options file can be used to add further server configuration options. Unfortunately, the documentation of the server configuration that comes with the BIND release 9.3.1 is not too useful, as it merely lists all the available options, without explaining them. The BIND release 8 ist much more helpful in this respect; as the configuration formats are largely compatible, it's documentation can be used to understand most of the available options.

A small section of the configuration is not accessible; it should not be changed normally. It primes the server with knowledge about the DNS root servers (as at 19th of February 2011), and sets up the loopback and broadcast zones.

License

BIND is open source software under the GPL (Wikipedia: GNU General Public License). I packaged the BIND binary from Slackware version 10.2 (the Thecus NAS firmware is based on this Linux distribution) utilising some scripts that Andreas Vogel wrote to package his SSHD NAS module. As all the components are under the GPL, so is the whole module package from this web page.

The GPL requires the source code to be available. The module file is a simple .tar.gz file that can be unpacked using the Unix tar tool. The scripts are their own source code. The BIND binary is straight from the Slackware install CD, so here is the source code from the Slackware source code CD.

Modified 2011-03-09 by Peter Rottengatter
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