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To learn about all of these options, get one of the big books on DNS. Our important options are stop, start, restart, and reload; ndc stop shuts down the nameserver, ndc start fires it up, and ndc restart stops and starts it. Restarting the nameserver will make it reread every zone file to bring itself up to date and will also flush its cache of third−party DNS information. (That's okay if your nameserver only serves information and doesn't provide lookups for end users.) If you want named to check all its zone files for updated information, but not dump its third−party cache, use ndc reload instead.

Starting Named at Boottime

If you're running a nameserver, you usually want it to start automatically at boottime. You can start named at boot with the rc.conf option named_enable:

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named_enable="YES"

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If you want to start it manually, use ndc(8), as discussed in the previous section.

Checking DNS

Once you've created your first zone, get a complete printout of the domain to check your work. (The axfr keyword for dig requests a list of all hosts in the domain.)

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# dig @primarynameserver domainname axfr

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Now read the results. Are all the names as you expected? Do you have hosts with double domain names, such as http://absolutebsd.com/? If so, you forgot a period. Are all your mail servers and nameservers showing up? If not, fix them.

You can use dnswalk(1) (/usr/ports/net/dnswalk) to double−check your work. This tool will catch a wide variety of standard configuration problems, though it won't catch conceptual problems. If you have a host using a CNAME, but the canonical name is a CNAME back to the first hostname (a

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