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Hello, I’m looking for some advice on setting up DNS for a new company. I’m a software engineer, but I’ve been tasked with getting a server up and running for the office. The company started small with 5-10 folks, and within a month as grown to 30 individuals. We have a new xServe with Snow Leopard server on it, and ‘m trying to make sure things are setup well for future growth. I’d really appreciate some help on the best way to proceed.

First a little background. The company has registered a domain with Network Solutions that currently points to a web hosting company and they have an MX record that points to FuseMail for their email. I’m trying to set things up so that eventual. Having the web site and email hosted by hosting companies works well for now, but we’d be looking to move some of those services in house after things settle down. The domain name is of the form company-name.com.

As for network setup we have a T1 line coming in from the ISP with 5 static IP addresses. The router configuration is managed by the ISP. We want to have VPN remote access into the network at the office so I was going to ask the ISP to map one of the static public IPs into an address on the local subnet. Does that sound about right?

In order to run Open Directory and other services we’ll need to have a local DNS server. I’ve investigated back and forth going with the company-name.com naming scheme vs company-name.private, and I think I’d like to use the proper .com top level domain. I thought it would also be a good idea to put all the machines on the network in a subdomain. It seems like all the windows admins use ad for Active Directory so I figured I’d use od for Open Directory. That leaves me with a fqdn for the server of server1.od.company-name.com and a local IP of 192.168.1.10 that also maps to a public IP address. Does that sound right?

I’ve read a lot about DNS setup on OS X server and I still have some questions. I’m confused if I will be able to run DNS for our domain and still be able to point to the web hosting company and the mail hosting company. Do I create a new master zone for company-name.com or od.company-name.com? I’m not sure how to handle the subdomain part. Which type of records do I add to point to the existing web and mail hosting?

Thanks

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