[CentOS] DNS Serving - Why my own?

Mon Oct 5 17:21:18 UTC 2009
Ryan Pugatch <rpug at tripadvisor.com>

Kemp, Larry wrote:
> All great responses. 
> 
> Why would a small business want to run their own DNS? Independence and control.
> 
> If you want or require the ability to route people to internal (on your LAN/WAN) web-based applications to URL's like http://intranet or https://yourcompanyquickenbooks this is one way rather than having your employees try and remember things like https://10.1.1.1 or maintaining a bunch of lmosts (Win) and /etc/hosts (*nix) files on workstations and laptops. Or if you have trouble frequently with your ISP's DNS servers (Comcast or whoever) this is a simple way to go (caching). Make sure you secure it and have it nicely hidden in a DMZ or on your internal net through. One snag to keep in mind is that if you have your internal server acting authoritatively for yourcompany.com and externally it is a different SOA you could run into overlap issues. But in general the reason is that most companies have stuff in their internal DNS they certainly do not want known in the public and want to manipulate resolution internally for some things. But if your business can live without the 
be
>  nefits or protection that running your DNS server internally brings, then really no need to add another server to your admin duties unless you are really excited to manage a DNS server or tackle some complex and uber-secure Master/Slave architecture as a project. Hopes this helps.    
> 

Another reason would be to avoid your ISP's redirection when a host 
doesn't resolve.  Comcast, for example, will send your request to their 
search page.  This can confuse some people, or can potentially end up 
leading you to a malicious page (I don't trust their search results). 
It's also annoying because pretty much everything will resolve whether 
it is valid or not.



Ryan Pugatch
Systems Administrator, TripAdvisor