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I don't quite understand why people have this allergy to running their own DNS. If you just want a single text file and don't need anything major, dnsmasq will serve records out of /etc/hosts. Slightly up the chain in terms of power, MaraDNS lets you use a text file, and finally there's PowerDNS (which I use) lets you use SQL databases, embed Lua, or read from a pipe. (Being able to use a regular RDBMS is nice for things like writing a little cron job to do your own dynamic DNS, or doing self-service hosting for people.)

If you've never done it, it is a couple of hours of reading and fiddling, but very quick if you have set up DNS before. I'm actually a bit curious about why people (even some sysadmins!) tend to spend time clicking on some clunky web interface to update records manually when it's actually easier to do it yourself. (Mail servers, on the other hand...)



A bit surprised not to see Bind mentioned here, as it's a kind of an industry standard.

Personally, I got Bind installed on all my machines, both for DNS zones and resolving. The only exception is my phone, and that is only because I couldn't find a package for it.

For those that do not want to deal with config files, there is also GUIs like gadmin-bind.


Sorry for the omission; I think Bind is actually a bit tricky to configure by comparison to the other three mentioned.




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