[ale] DNS best practices

mattyml at bellsouth.net mattyml at bellsouth.net
Sat Dec 18 20:22:48 EST 2004


On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Bob Toxen wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 10:44:33AM -0500, Cordell, Ron wrote:
>> Hi all,
>
>> I was hoping to draw on your expertise to get an idea of some best
>> practices for DNS.
>
>> I'm trying to determine if it is best to have one DNS server, or
>> multiple DNS servers for an environment. The environment consists of a
>> few hosts in a DMZ, with many hosts behind a firewall (behind the DMZ).
>> The hosts behind the firewall are divided up into vLANs, and are in
>> several subdomains. Does it make sense to put a single DNS server in the
>> DMZ, and use that, or would you recommend putting the server elsewhere?
>> If machine resources are scarce, I don't want to have to create a lot of
>> DNS servers.
>
>> I appreciate any suggestions.
> If your firewall is good, i.e., someone on the Internet cannot spoof
> packets to appear to come from your DNS server, then one DNS server
> (or a pair for redundancy) in the DMZ should suffice, assuming it is
> running on a hardened Linux or UNIX system.
>
> Of course, you'll want to ensure that your internal DNS entries cannot be
> obtained by anyone from the Internet.  Of course, properly configuring
> a DNS server is non-trivial.  You'll also want to ensure that it's kept
> up-to-date w.r.t. security patches.

You can also use tiny DNS if security is imperative. TinyDNS is super easy
to setup, and contains the essentials required to run DNS. There is
a $500 reward to exploit it, and no one has claimed the cash yet.

>
>> -ronc
>
> Bob Toxen
> Fly-By-Day Consulting, Inc.
> "Your expert in Firewalls, Virus and Spam Filters, VPNs,
> Network Monitoring, and Network Security consulting"
>
> http://www.verysecurelinux.com       [Network & Linux/Unix Security Consulting]
> http://www.realworldlinuxsecurity.com [My 5* book: "Real World Linux Security"]
> bob at verysecurelinux.com (e-mail)
> +1 770-662-8321  (Office: 10am-6pm M-F US Eastern Time)
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