Setup a DNS zone

We here use a short TTL while initial deployment of the service (21600 seconds - 6 hours). For testing purposes you may otherwise even reduce it to 300 seconds (5 minutes) or 1800 (30 minutes). However, once everything is in place, eventually switch to 86400 - 24 hours.

Note we’re using the same TTL for both $TTL AND the SOA record itself.

zone=example.local
time=`date +%s`
secondary=nssec.online.net

# be it for internal or public network
ip=x.x.x.x

# w/o chroot
zonefile=/etc/nsd/$zone.db

# chroot
zonefile=/var/chroot/var/db/$zone.db

note the trailing dot after zone name

# BEWARE ESCAPES ARE IN THERE
cat > $zonefile <<EOF
\$ORIGIN $zone.
\$TTL 21600

@       IN      SOA     $zone. abuse.$zone. (
            $time       ; serial number
            3600                    ; refresh
            900                     ; retry
            1209600                 ; expire
            21600           ; ttl
            )

@       IN NS           ns.$zone.
@       IN NS           $secondary.
@       IN MX           5 mx
@       IN A            $ip
*               IN A            $ip
ns              IN A            $ip
mx              IN A            $ip
EOF

Eventually define a host in case this is a hosting domain

host            IN A            $ip

Eventually define a PXE server in case this is a internal network

pxe             IN CNAME        host