Topic: Oddest DNS issue -- is djbdns the answer?

[Greg Brooks]

Folks,

First, a bit of kudos to the developers, e-smith is EXACTLY what I've been searching for, and now I must build a church to this company!

OK, now on to the problem: I have to live with an odd multi-IP situation, and I'm looking for ways to resolve it using either e-smith's BIND or some other solution.

Every box on my network lives by three IP addresses (all of these are real for the purposes of this discussion):

* To the outside world, I have one and only one IP address: 209.15.194.32

* To everyone in my building (which owns the T! and the border router), I'm seen as 200.200.200.250 (and yes, that *is* a valid IP address somewhere in Brazil, but for reasons unknown to me the sysadmin chooses this block as an internal, non-world-routable block).

* To my LAN, I'm 192.168.1.x (depending on which box I'm using... the e-smith machine will be on 192.168.1.21)

Using djbdns, this is easy to accomplish using location codes -- however, I'm really, REALLY trying not to run a separate DNS box (or a secondary DNS -- and yes, I know that's living dangerously). Sooo, I think that leaves me with:

* Farm out all of the DNS work to a company like www.easydns.com

* Run a separate DNS box (which, for a variety of reasons, would necessitate getting a better/different firewall)

* Figure out how to manage this with e-smith

So, the big questions:

* Can djbdns even be run on the same box with e-smith without breaking it? (likely answer: no... but I thought I'd check)

* If not, is there a functional equivalent of location codes for BIND? (Bear in mind, I want the box to be world-visible, not just LAN/WAN visible. I would also like the box to serve as a local resolver for DNS requests from my LAN, but I'll live without that if I have to.)

I've seen some posts on setting up "public DNS" for e-smith, and I'm not quite sure whether this is what I need or not -- if so, just point me back to those tutorials and I'll go my merry way. If I can get djbdns to work, however (even if it likely means having to ignore the spiffy web interface for setting up and deleting host names via e-smith), then I guess that would be my preference because at least I understand djbdns... can't say the same for BIND.

Many thanks,
Greg B.