[CentOS] new CentOS 5 as DNS server

Thu Aug 2 17:16:08 UTC 2007
Jay Lee <jlee at pbu.edu>

Ray Leventhal wrote:
> As a breather from the
> "thread-now-wider-than-my-headers-window-in-thunderbird" conversation
> re: mixing repos, I have a question regarding a machine I'm about to put
> online. :)
>
> I run a web hosting company and my secondary (primary to the world) DNS
> box died from a massive rootkit/hack last night.  It was running an old
> Slackware 9.1 installation and I will be completely cleaning those
> drives sector-by-sector.  After which I'll be installing CentOS 5 on
> that hardware.
>
>   

CentOS 5 is a .0 release, you might be better served using CentOS 4.5 
which has had much more tme to prove itself as a DNS Server.  4.5 also 
has a good bit of time left on updates to (till Feb 29th, 2012) so you 
shouldn't worry to much about it becoming obsolete.

> As it will be a production server and this is my first foray into
> CentOS/SELinux in a production environment I was hoping to get a
> recommended list of what to include and, more specifically, what *not*
> to include from the distro CDs
>
>   

As others have said, start with a bare minimal install and add as you 
need to.  Unless you do a custom kickstart, you'll certainly want to go 
through and remove some of the packages that are in the default install 
but aren't really necessary for a single task server (e.g. bluez-utils, 
NetworkManager, etc).
> I will be doing a text based install, hoping to avoid the installation
> of X.  Other than BIND and vsftpd, I don't think I need much.  

Why do you need vsftpd?  Plain text FTP could prove very dangerous.  
Maybe you should take this chance to switch over to something more 
secure like SFTP.  The nice thing about sftp is it's up and running 
straight out of the box since SSH is enabled by default.
> This
> machine will be pulling zone files from my primary web server and
> storing some archive files and backups for me.
>
> I'm dilligently R`ingTFMs, and will continue to.... I'd sure be
> appreciative of any jumpstart help and/or any pitfalls of which to be
> cognizant.
>   

Good luck,

Jay

-- 
Jay Lee <jlee at pbu.edu>
Network/Systems Administrator
Information Technology Department
Philadelphia Biblical University
--