Setting up an authoritative-only DNS server

In this recipe, we will learn how to create an authoritative-only DNS server, which can give answers to queries about domains under their control themselves instead of redirecting the query to other DNS servers (such as our caching-only DNS server from the previous recipe). We will create a DNS server to resolve all our own hostnames and services in our own private local network.

As said before, while Unbound should be your first choice when needing a caching-only DNS server as it is the most secure DNS server solution available, it has only limited authoritative capabilities which often is not enough for professional DNS server usage. Here, instead of name lookup of our local servers, we will use the popular authoritative BIND DNS server package and configure a new DNS zone to provide highly customizable name resolution. Technically speaking, we will be writing both a forward and reverse zone file for our domain. Zone files are text files that...