Title: Plan a Public/Private Domain
Course: CIS 208: Linux/UNIX III: Intermediate System Administration, Networking, and Security ~ For IGNITE Review > Section: Learning Modules

Plan a Private Domain

The new best practice is to have a single public domain for use on the Internet and a separate domain under .local for internal use.  For example, mycompany.com might use mycompany.local.  This clearly distinguishes internal assets from publicly accessible ones.  However, many organizations have a single domain which they use for both public and private uses.  We'll look at how to plan for this usage case.

The first item is to decide what nameservers will be used for each of the locations served.

- It is considered best practice to have 2 or more servers for public usage and two other servers for internal usage.
- Some smaller organizations use a service to provide public servers and only support their internal servers.  Others choose to provide internal and public zones on a single set of servers.
- Based on organizational resources and preferences, determine which servers will be used for the public and private locations.

The second item is to list all the resource records which are needed internally.

- The IP addresses to be used will be non-routeable, and it will include all hosts on the internal network.
- MX and NS records will need to be appropriate for internal use.

The third item is to list all the resource records which are required from the Internet.

- It will only include hosts that can be reached from the Internet, and all IP address will be routeable.
- MX and NS records will need to be appropriate for the Internet.

The fourth item is to configure bind.

- Start by creating multiple views, one for the localhost, one for internal use and one for the Internet.
- For each view determine what addresses it will serve and whether or not it will provide recursive lookups.
- Then create the zone files for each view and test that they work correctly, testing on the localhost, the internal network, and from the Internet.