Geoff Hankerson

Note: it took me several tries to get this working. If you are new to DNS be patient with yourself - you'll get it, but may take a few tries.

Why run a wildcard DNS server when its such a pain to set up?

A wildcard DNS setup lets you automatically have subdomains for a given domain. For example, say you own the domain widgets.com and you want to setup an unlimited number of subdomains like dev.widgets.com, test.widgets.com, customers.widgets.com, etc.... Typically you would have to set these all up individually. A wildcard DNS can let you bypass a lot of configuration. In a development environment it can let you setup any number of test/development sites very quickly and easily. Drupal developers in particular can leverage Drupal's multisite installation feature to setup lots of sites for development or production very quickly.

In this example I will concentrate on setting a development environment with OSX using wildcard DNS

Overview of Steps

I. Edit /etc/named.conf to add a zone.
II. Add a zone file at /var/named/
III. Check the syntax of named.conf and your zone files for errors
IV. Edit /etc/resolv.conf
V. Set your computers network settings to use 127.0.0.1 as a name server
VI. Start up Bind
VII. Check setup with dig
VIII. Reboot if needed

Before we start a few more notes.

I tend to use the nano text editor to edit Unix configuration files you could use Emacs, VI, Textmate, BBEdit or the editor of your choice.

Backup all these files we are editing so you can start over if you mess up. I didn't do this and it added more time to the project.
For example to backup /etc/named.conf do:

Last, most of the files we need to edit are owned by root so you will need to use sudo to edit these files. If you get tired of typing sudo you can become root by doing this:

Be careful when working as root or using sudo. You can mess up your system so make sure to backup. All example here are run as root.

I. Edit /etc/named.conf to add a zone

We need to edit named.conf to add our zone.

I called my zone vmdev so I added this to named.conf

I added this right before the zone 0.0.127.inaddr.apra and saved the file. So we told Bind to look in /var/named/db.vmdev for this zone.

II. Add a zone file at /var/named/

You can just copy this but be sure to change 192.168.0.199 to you Mac's IP address

III. Check the syntax of named.conf and your zone files for errors

Run this to check your named.conf file:

If it returns nothing, your named.conf file is at least syntactically correct. If there is an error, then well you have to diagnose and fix the error.

Now run this to check your zone file:

It should return something like this:

If there are errors then diagnose and fix them.

IV. Edit /etc/resolv.conf

V. Set your computers network settings to use 127.0.0.1 as a name server

Do this at System Preferences -> Network.
You may want to use your ISPs Name server as the second name server

VI. Start up Bind

The -w option tells OSX to enable Bind at startup

VII. Check setup with dig

Should return something like this:

The key here is status NOERROR; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 45640
If you get an error then check previous steps.

Now try:

$ ping faker.vmdev

should return:

but if it does not got to VIII.

VIII. Reboot if needed.

I needed to reboot to get everything to take. Whoila! Have a cookie or something.