In this post I’ll lay out how to setup bind to be authoritative for a single domain, and to respond with a single IP address for any request for that domain.
I’m doing a bunch of DNS performance testing. I want to see how fast bind can respond to authoritative domains, but the requests could be for any hostname. Eg. If I request the IP for somerandomhost.example.com I want it to report the same IP as for someotherrandomhost.example.com.
Running on Ubuntu 16.04, I first install bind9.
Note that I’m using example.com. It might be better to use a internal domain in your case. At any rate, try to make sure that your testing doesn’t egress outside the boundaries of your lab.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install bind9
Next, configure an example.com zone file in /etc/bind.
$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA ns.yourdomain.com. hostmaster.yourdomain.com. (
2008032701 ; Serial
8H ; Refresh
2H ; Retry
1W ; Expire
1D) ; Minimum
NS ns
* A 127.0.0.1
Note the “*” line that means respond to any request with 127.0.0.1.
Add the below to named.conf.local to get bind to pickup the example.com domain.
zone "example.com" in {
type master;
file "/etc/bind/example.com";
};
Add these options to named.conf.options. This will disable recursive queries. I’m only going to be testing authoritative requests and don’t want external requests at all.
recursion no;
additional-from-auth no;
additional-from-cache no;
Start/restart bind9.
systemctl restart bind9
systemctl status bind9
Run a quick test to ensure recursion is not allowed.
$ dig @localhost news.google.com
; <<>> DiG 9.10.3-P4-Ubuntu <<>> @localhost news.google.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 47477
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;news.google.com. IN A
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Nov 18 11:09:29 UTC 2018
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 44
Note in the above “WARNING: recursion requested but not available”. That is what we want to see: no recursion.
Once that has all been setup and bind9 restarted, we can do something like this:
$ dig @localhost `cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid`.example.com
; <<>> DiG 9.10.3-P4-Ubuntu <<>> @localhost 69a65fd2-2223-485b-a6aa-156152db4318.example.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 3370
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 2
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;69a65fd2-2223-485b-a6aa-156152db4318.example.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
69a65fd2-2223-485b-a6aa-156152db4318.example.com. 86400 IN A 127.0.0.1
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
example.com. 86400 IN NS ns.example.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns.example.com. 86400 IN A 127.0.0.1
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Nov 18 11:27:45 UTC 2018
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 126
bind responds that the IP for the host is at 127.0.0.1.
Let’s run it once more, with +short.
$ dig +short @localhost `cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid`.example.com
127.0.0.1
Note how I’m using /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid to generate a new…er random uuid. Neat huh.
$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid
f6759215-323d-438b-b4da-535a8aabc63f
If you ever need a uuid, that is an easy way to get one without having to install any other software.
If, for some reason, you want to configure bind to be
then at this point you should be happy!