I recently had occasion to do some Mac OS X DNS configuration. Primary DNS setup is pretty straightforward, but I always get stuck on the secondary DNS config, and this week I had the (not so) rare privilege of discovering I'd been doing it wrong all along. I thought I'd post some quickie instructions for next time this comes up.
So, to set up your Mac OS X Server as a secondary DNS server (that is, if the primary goes down, this one will act as a failover), you'll need to open Server Admin and navigate to the DNS section (we'll use the 10.4 version, but the basic gist is the same in 10.5). Next, add a secondary zone under "Secondary Zones." This first one will be for your forward lookups. In the first field add the full name of your zone. In the second field add the IP address of your primary DNS server. It should look like this:
Secondary DNS: Forward Lookups
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Now add another secondary zone for the reverse lookups. This is exactly the same except that instead of the zone name in the first field, you'll use the reverse zone information. It looks like this:
Secondary DNS: Reverse Lookups
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Note that the reverse IP in the field should cover the zone IP range. That is, if your primary DNS server covers "192.168.1" zone, you'll enter the reverse info for that range. If your primary DNS covers all of "192.168" (notice the truncated IP number) then you should enter that. All together it should look like this:
Secondary DNS: All Together Now
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Once this is all set up and saved, you can start the service. You can tell it worked by listing the contents of /var/named. You should see two new files, one called your.domain.com.bak and one called your.IP.in-addr.arpa.bak. And these should be populated with the same DNS info as your primary.
And that's it! Enter the new secondary DNS server info in your Network System Preferences, just after the primary, and if your main DNS fails you'll be covered.
Oh, almost forgot, thanks to this dude for helping me figure all this out.