ServerBuddies Support Blog

Domain zone files

Here is an example for a domain file for yourdomain.com. Please note this is a very generic example and there are more features to it. Please refer to the BIND documentation for help with these features.

Any line starting with a ; is a comment line and is ignored by BIND. The first 6 lines are configuration lines for the zone. These lines tell it what the zone is (yourdomain.com) who is responsible for it (root.yourdomain.com which is equivalent to root@yourdomain.com) and a few other things. These other things include a serial number used for keeping track of when it’s updated, how often to refresh the database, how often to retry a zone transfer, when the zone information will expire and a default time to live. *IMPORTANT* Whenever you make changes to the zone file, you MUST increment the serial number. If you do not do this, prolems can occur, especially if you are a primary server supplying information to secondary sites. Most of this information is only used if you have both master and slave systems

The next two lines tell it who the primary DNS server is and who should get the mail for this domain. You can have multiple listings of each of these. To add more dns servers just repeat exactly what is listed changing the dns.yourdomain.com with another dns server. To add another mail server you do the same thing except you have an extra field. The “10″ in the MX line states a priority, lower number being first. What this means is if you have 2 MX listings, one is 10 and one is 20, it will try to deliver the mail to the MX listing with the 10 priority and if it fails it will then go to the MX listing with the 20 priority.

The rest of the zone file lists all your hosts and ips.

Tags: Domain, Files, zone

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