admin guide dns and bind

Murray McAllister murray.mcallister at gmail.com
Tue Nov 27 11:17:57 UTC 2007


On Nov 24, 2007 11:14 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 17:22 +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:

> Unfortunately, this usage flies in the face of all the assumptions and
> guidelines for Fedora technical documentation.  The section *must* be
> rewritten to deal with administrators doing 'yum install bind' and
> proceeding from there.  If you don't have time to fix it now, that's
> perfectly OK.  It just needs to be fixed before publication, or its
> inclusion deferred.

For some reason I thought the entire guide had to be finished by the
25th of November, which is why I thought it would be best to do what I
already knew. I should have time in the coming weeks to get my head
around how red hat / fedora package bind, and be able to rewrite
accordingly. There are fair few things to be changed, for example it
seemed that rndc worked right after installing bind, without have to
generate keys or edit named.conf - lots for me to learn...


> Please remember, all, that one of Fedora's strong points is its robust
> software management capability via RPM and yum.  Any and all procedures
> that you are writing for the AG need to use Fedora "best practices,"
> which include using yum to install and remove software.  When we don't
> use our own best practices in documentation, it sends a signal that (A)
> best practices don't matter (bad!), or (B) we don't trust them (worse!).

I'm a freak and have only *just* started using distribution packages
for services. I'm not sure if it is because I don't trust the
packages, but maybe because I was too lazy to have to re-learn how to
do everything everytime I used a different distrubutions package for
service <x>. Also because I'm not use to it, I installed the Red Hat
packages for bind and was amazed at all the configuration files it
automatically created: db.this, db.that, named.foo, named.bar, and so
on ;)

I agree that they should 'yum install bind' instead of what I have written...


>
> As guide lead, Bart will undoubtedly be looking at these topics as we
> prepare to go to "second-draft" phase (or whatever the next phase is).
>
> > Also, what is the policy on linking to external websites? I have a few
> > links to other sites, such as http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns ...
> > these sites may not be around as long as the guide though.
>
> I would think that external links need to satisfy some definition of
> "authoritative," but I'm not sure what that definition entails.  Linking
> to Joe Public's home website that is a checklist of how to run DNS on
> Gentoo is probably not a great choice.  Linking to a website by a
> recognized authority (such as a published author, e.g. the link you
> provided above) is much better.
>
> > I have included a "references and thanks" section at the end. These
> > were the books and resources I used when I wrote the original paper
> > that I used for this guide, however that knowledge is now common to me
> > - so are the links needed? I don't think there should be a list like
> > this in an admin guide anyway...but I don't want to take credit for
> > someone elses work. If it shouldn't be there (I'm not sure it needs to
> > be since it is common knowledge to me now).
> >
> > Thanks for any help or suggestions.
>
> Bibliographic resources are great.  They should be collected at the end
> of the Administration Guide, set out by section per topic if necessary,
> or simply note in a paragraph that the following resources pertained to
> topic X.

I think placing links at the end would be best. A lot of them pertain
to multiple sections.

Thanks for the feedback and advice.

Regards,

Murray.




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