BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is a popular open-source implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol, which is used to translate human-readable domain names into IP addresses that computers can understand. In this article, we will explain how to install and configure BIND on Ubuntu 22.04 to act as a DNS server, and we will also show you how to create a DNS zone and add DNS records to it.

To begin, we need to update our system packages and install the necessary dependencies:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y bind9 bind9utils bind9-doc

Once the packages are installed, we need to configure BIND to act as a DNS server. The main configuration file for BIND is /etc/bind/named.conf, and this file contains a number of different sections that control the behavior of the DNS server.

The first section we need to configure is the options section, which defines global options for the DNS server. This section is where we specify the directory for the BIND data files, the DNS server’s IP address and port, and the DNS server’s behavior when it receives queries.

For example, to configure BIND to use the /var/cache/bind directory for its data files, listen on IP address 192.168.1.100 on port 53, and allow recursion for clients, we could use the following options section:

options {
    directory "/var/cache/bind";
    listen-on { 192.168.1.100; };
    allow-recursion { any; };
};

Next, we need to configure the zone section, which defines the DNS zones that the DNS server will be responsible for. A DNS zone is a portion of the DNS namespace, and it contains the DNS records for a particular domain or subdomain.

For example, to configure BIND to be the authoritative DNS server for the example.com domain, we could use the following zone section:

zone "example.com" {
    type master;
    file "/etc/bind/zones/example.com.db";
};

This zone section tells BIND that it should be the authoritative DNS server for the example.com domain, and that the DNS records for the domain are stored in the /etc/bind/zones/example.com.db file.

To create the DNS zone, we need to create a file called /etc/bind/zones/example.com.db and populate it with the DNS records for the example.com domain.

Each DNS record in the zone file consists of four fields: the domain name, the DNS record type, the time-to-live (TTL) value, and the data for the DNS record. For example, a DNS record for the www.example.com host might look like this:

www.example.com. IN A 3600 192.168.1.100

This record specifies that the www.example.com host has an A record (which maps a domain name to an IP address), with a TTL of 3600 seconds, and an IP address of 192.168.1.100.

You can add as many DNS records as you need to the zone file, depending on the needs of your domain. For example, you might want to add MX records to specify the mail servers for the domain, or CNAME records to create aliases for other domains or hosts.

Once you have added the DNS records to the zone file, you can save the file and restart the BIND server to apply the changes:

sudo service bind9 restart

After the BIND server has restarted, it will be serving the DNS records for the example.com domain, and it will be able to resolve queries for the domain. You can test this by using the dig command to query the DNS server for the www.example.com host:

dig @192.168.1.100 www.example.com

This should return the DNS records for the www.example.com host, as specified in the /etc/bind/zones/example.com.db zone file.

In conclusion, setting up and configuring BIND on Ubuntu 22.04 to act as a DNS server is a straightforward process. By configuring the options and zone sections in the named.conf file, and by creating a zone file for your domain, you can quickly and easily create a DNS server that serves your domain’s DNS records.