SSO & NFS Homedirs Part 1a: DNS for my Home Network

This post is incomplete, but I didn’t want it sitting around as a draft any longer. Well, it has been over a month since I started my co-op job. I’m writing this post from the iPad that I get intermittent access to at work, using the official Wordpress app for iPhone OS devices. Typing with the device in the vertical orientation is pretty much impossible for someone who is used to touch typing on a standard 104 key keyboard, and while the keys in the horizontal mode are more-or-less the same size as those on a regular apple keyboard, I still manage to make a mess of typing on it. If I actually get myself one of these for personal and/or school use, I’m going to need to get a real apple Bluetooth keyboard to go with it. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has been out now for ages, and I’ve been putting off the upgrade at home because I wanted to get Single Sign On (SSO) and centralized home directories working before the upgrade. I had this all half working at one point or another, but during the last upgrade I got frustrated and lazy and made copies of the passwd and shadow files, which was messy and evil and only worked because my family doesn’t change their passwords very often. I’d like to do it right for once. (Off topic: is it just me, or does this wordpress app not support copy and paste?) So the first part of getting set up is trivial; ubuntu is already installed on the home server. Basic essentials include ubuntu-standard, language-pack-en, ntp. I figure I should actually give it a nice dynamic domain name, and so I set off setting up BIND on my VPS. Then I go to netfirms’ website, thinking I’ll just delegate a subdomain to my VPS. Well, my support ticket for that is still open and not going anywhere, so alas I fork over some money and register a new domain name for my home network. For the sake of being contrary, I also decide to get secondary DNS from DynDNS. (Why is their custom DNS solution cheaper?) Configure the new zone in BIND, setting low TTL for now. Update NS records for ipv4 first, adding the glue record at net firms. This is listed as a custom nameserver and only works for ipv4 from what I can see. Set up basic A and AAAA records. Now the fun part… Dynamic DNS. Set up dns keys, acls, and dhcpd. Voilà. Now ipv6, shore wall. We’re moving offices at work this weekend, so I won’t have time to update this post for a week or so.