On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 08:39:49PM -0500, Dan McMahill wrote:
> I have a question about best practices for a small LAN.  I have a NetBSD 
> box which connects to a cable modem and provides NAT service to a small 
> LAN on the other side.  The external network card is configured via 
> dhcp.  The internal network is currently fixed IP addresses.
> 
> So my question is whats considered the best practice for dealing with 
> DNS.  It seems I have several options

> 5)  ??

I'd just setup bind on the NetBSD box to manage local DNS anyway and point
it to the ISP's DNS for root servers. Being able to resolve your local
boxes as well as domains on the internet is nice. All your local boxes
can refer to the NetBSD box in /etc/resolv.conf.

I don't know if this is exactly what you mean by "caching name server",
but as I understood a caching nameserver is not responsible for a zone
(i.e. your LAN's zone with a made-up domain that does not exist
on the internet). Bind will still cache requests to the outside world,
so you'll have both DNS caching and working local DNS.

If your LAN is really small, say, no more than 3 boxes, and is not
likely to grow in the future, configuring bind might be more overhead
than it is worth. Just assign static IPs via DHCP and manage DNS
via /etc/hosts files.
-- 
stefan
http://stsp.in-berlin.de                                 PGP Key: 0xF59D25F0