The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX
The BIND module opens to a screen with two sections (Figure 8-1). The upper portion of the page is devoted to global BIND options, such as other DNS servers, logging, access control, and more. The lower portion of the display provides a number of icons, one for each of the zones your BIND is responsible for. This will include all Master, Slave, Forward, and Stub zones.
Configuring your BIND server is an area where Webmin can really make things simpler. Even though DNS is a very simple service on the surface, the BIND configuration files are notoriously confusing, and it is very easy to make a mistake that will render your name server useless. That's not to say you can't misconfigure your name server with Webmin, but it does make it a lot easier to generate a syntactically correct BIND configuration.
| Note | There are three BIND versions in common usage today, specifically versions 4, 8, and 9. BIND 8 and 9 are functionally identical in many ways and share a configuration file syntax, so that a working BIND 8 configuration will very likely also be a working BIND 9 configuration. BIND 9 adds a few new features, but is primarily a rewrite of BIND 8 (the reasons for the rewrite are irrelevant for general users). Webmin has two BIND modules, one for 4 and one for 8 and 9. Because version 4 is extremely old and pretty rarely used outside of OpenBSD and older UNIX environments, it will not be covered here. BIND 8 and 9, because they share the same module and configuration syntax, can be covered together. Features available only in BIND 9 will be noted as such. |