domt4 / hesiod

Hesiod name service library

This is release 3.2.1 of the Hesiod name service library. Hesiod can provide general name service for a variety of applications and is based on the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND).

To prepare this directory for building, run the command ./configure. configure takes a number of options; use ./configure --help to find out what they are. Hesiod requires a vaguely ANSI compiler to build; gcc will do.

Run make or make all to build the Hesiod library.

Run make install to install the Hesiod library.

You will want to create a configuration file named hesiod.conf in the sysconfdir (/usr/local/etc/hesiod.conf by default) on your client machines, reading something like:

rhs=.your.domain
lhs=.ns

The value of rhs can be overridden at run time by the environment variable HES_DOMAIN. The value ".ns" for lhs is an unfortunate historical convention; ".hs" or "hesiod" would have been better. Nevertheless, you probably want to use ".ns" for compatibility with existing Hesiod domains.

To create Hesiod information on your central name servers, you need to make them authoritative for the domain ns.your.domain with a line in named.boot reading something like:

primary		ns.your.domain		named.hesiod

And then in named.hesiod, you need data looking something like:

; SOA and NS records.
@	IN	SOA	server1.your.domain admin-address.your.domain (
		40000	      ; serial - database version number
		1800	      ; refresh - sec servers
		300	      ; retry - for refresh
		3600000       ; expire - unrefreshed data
		7200 )        ; min
		NS	server1.your.domain
		NS	server2.your.domain

; Actual Hesiod data.
haynes.grplist	TXT	"haynes:2638"
haynes.group	TXT	"haynes:*:2638:"
2638.gid	CNAME	haynes.group
zephyr.sloc	TXT	"zephyrserver1.my.domain"
zephyr.sloc	TXT	"zephyrserver2.my.domain"

There is a mailing list at MIT for Hesiod users, [email protected]. To get yourself on or off the list, send mail to [email protected].