I have an OS X 10.6 Server running, which has PHP, Apache, MySQL, and DNS running on it. I want to take the DNS management out of the Server Admin App. I know that the DNS configuration files (the ones BIND uses) are plain text files (which have to obey some rules, obviously).
The main reason for this is because I wanted to setup DKIM for one of my domains, and I had to add a TXT record to the subdomain pm._domainkey.example.com. Server Admin did not let me add that subdomain, because of the “invalid” underscore character.
I searched for web based DNS management tools (the ones that I would install on my server and would allow me to manage my DNS records), but I couldn’t find any good ones. (There were a couple that I managed to install, but they didn’t see the configuration that I already had setup in Server Admin). Now I’m looking into editing the config files directly, but I don’t know where they’re located.
This is a test / development server, so messing it up wouldn’t be such a disaster. I know “I shouldn’t do this”, but I want to :).
Thanks for your help.
You don’t need to stop using Server Admin to manage the DNS, just go behind its back to add the records it can’t handle. This is possible because in OS X Server v10.6 each DNS zone’s contents are actually stored as two separate files: /var/named/zones/db.zonename.zone.apple has all of the Server Admin-managed contents, and /var/named/db.zonename. has just a comment and an include directive to pull in the .zone.apple file. Because Server Admin only looks at & changes the .zone.apple file, you can add whatever resource records you want to the second file — they’ll be ignored by Server Admin but served by the DNS service.