Olaf Kirch - Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

› set type=NS

› .

Server: tao.linux.org.au

Address: 203.41.101.121

Non-authoritative answer:

(root) name server = A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

(root) name server = M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET

Authoritative answers can be found from:

A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 198.41.0.4

H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 128.63.2.53

B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 128.9.0.107

C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 192.33.4.12

D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 128.8.10.90

E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 192.203.230.10

I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 192.36.148.17

F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 192.5.5.241

G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 192.112.36.4

J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 198.41.0.10

K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 193.0.14.129

L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 198.32.64.12

M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET internet address = 202.12.27.33

To see the complete set of available commands, use the help command in nslookup.

There are a few tools that can help you with your tasks as a BIND administrator. We will briefly describe two of them here. Please refer to the documentation that comes with these tools for more information on how to use them.

hostcvt helps you with your initial BIND configuration by converting your /etc/hosts file into master files for named. It generates both the forward (A) and reverse mapping (PTR) entries, and takes care of aliases. Of course, it won't do the whole job for you, as you may still want to tune the timeout values in the SOA record, for example, or add MX records. Still, it may help you save a few aspirins. hostcvt is part of the BIND source, but can also be found as a standalone package on a few Linux FTP servers.

After setting up your name server, you may want to test your configuration. Some good tools that make this job much simpler: the first is called dnswalk, which is a Perl-based package. The second is called nslint. They both walk your DNS database looking for common mistakes and verify that the information they find is consistent. Two other useful tools are host and dig, which are general purpose DNS database query tools. You can use these tools to manually inspect and diagnose DNS database entries.

These tools are likely to be available in prepackaged form. dnswalk and nslint are available in source from http://www.visi.com/~barr/dnswalk/ and ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/nslint.tar.Z. The host and dig source codes can be found at ftp://ftp.nikhef.nl/pub/network/ and ftp://ftp.is.co.za/networking/ip/dns/dig/.

Packet protocols like IP or IPX rely upon the receiver host knowing where the start and end of each packet are in the data stream. The mechanism used to mark and detect the start and end of packets is called delimitation . The Ethernet protocol manages this mechanism in a LAN environment, and the SLIP and PPP protocols manage it for serial communications lines.

The comparatively low cost of low-speed dialup modems and telephone circuits has made the serial line IP protocols immensely popular, especially for providing connectivity to end users of the Internet. The hardware required to run SLIP or PPP is simple and readily available. All that is required is a modem and a serial port equipped with a FIFO buffer.

The SLIP protocol is very simple to implement and at one time was the more common of the two. Today almost everyone uses the PPP protocol instead. The PPP protocol adds a host of sophisticated features that contribute to its popularity today, and we'll look at the most important of these later.

Linux supports kernel-based drivers for both SLIP and PPP. The drivers have both been around for some time and are stable and reliable. In this chapter and the next, we'll discuss both protocols and how to configure them.

To use SLIP or PPP, you have to configure some basic networking features as described in the previous chapters. You must set up the loopback interface and configure the name resolver. When connecting to the Internet, you will want to use DNS. Your options here are the same as for PPP: you can perform your DNS queries across your serial link by configuring your Internet Service Provider's IP address into your /etc/resolv.conf file, or configure a caching-only name server as described under "Caching-only named Configuration" in Chapter 6, "Name Service and Resolver Configuration."

Dialup IP servers frequently offer SLIP service through special user accounts. After logging in to such an account, you are not dropped into the common shell; instead, a program or shell script is executed that enables the server's SLIP driver for the serial line and configures the appropriate network interface. Then you have to do the same at your end of the link.

On some operating systems, the SLIP driver is a user-space program; under Linux, it is part of the kernel, which makes it a lot faster. This speed requires, however, that the serial line be converted to the SLIP mode explicitly. This conversion is done by means of a special tty line discipline, SLIPDISC. While the tty is in normal line discipline (DISC0), it exchanges data only with user processes, using the normal read(2) and write(2) calls, and the SLIP driver is unable to write to or read from the tty. In SLIPDISC, the roles are reversed: now any user-space processes are blocked from writing to or reading from the tty, while all data coming in on the serial port is passed directly to the SLIP driver.

The SLIP driver itself understands a number of variations on the SLIP protocol. Apart from ordinary SLIP, it also understands CSLIP, which performs the so-called Van Jacobson header compression (described in RFC-1144) on outgoing IP packets. This compression improves throughput for interactive sessions noticeably. There are also six-bit versions for each of these protocols.

A simple way to convert a serial line to SLIP mode is by using the slattach tool. Assume you have your modem on /dev/ttyS3 and have logged in to the SLIP server successfully. You will then execute:

# slattach /dev/ttyS3 &

This tool switches the line discipline of ttyS3 to SLIPDISC and attaches it to one of the SLIP network interfaces. If this is your first active SLIP link, the line will be attached to sl0 ; the second will be attached to sl1 , and so on. The current kernels support a default maximum of 256 simultaneous SLIP links.

The default line discipline chosen by slattach is CSLIP. You may choose any other discipline using the -p switch. To use normal SLIP (no compression), you use:

# slattach -p slip /dev/ttyS3 &