Real DNS on a OS-X Server not the cached version in 10.5 & 10.6

Question

For the last year or so i have been running tenon.com itool9.05i on two Mac minis while I was running Leopard Server then Snow Leopard Server on two more mac minis. The 4 CPU idea worked well but I have been wishing I could just put DNS on my two Snow Leopard Servers and use my other two minis for other projects.
Well I found a way of doing just that and it was only mildly painful in the learning curve.
When you get ready to do the following please remember this has nothing to do with the Macintosh side of things so the IP address of your two name servers CAN NOT be defined in your Mac's Network Control Panel. CAN NOT...
1. Download VirtualBox from Oracle.
2. Download ubuntu-10.04-server-i386 this is the 32bit server version of Ubuntu.
I highly recommend you only install DNS (BIND9) server and do not add a GUI but instead add WEBMIN and admin your new server from Safari on the Mac side.
Go here and print out this very short tutorial:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/webadmin/forums/forum/600155/topic/3694824?messa ge=8385678
The 2nd line is going to be added to the file you opened in the first line.
The 4th line is a command so type it in exactly.
When the install completes just leave your Ubuntu Server running and jump into Safari or FireFox and type in the IP of your server as follows:
https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxxt:10000/
When you get DNS setup you will be typing in:
https://ns1.my-server-name.com:10000/
You may want to change the port from 10000 to something unusual.
You will have already setup a Ubuntu username and password so use them. Do not worry about the self signed certificate as it is your own server and it is you going in.
I do love my OS-X Servers but I hated not having real DNS so this is my workaround.

Answer 1

I'm not clear what problem you're trying to solve here -- the DNS server in both Leopard and Snow Leopard server is BIND, and as far as I know isn't crippled ("cached"?) in any way. The Server Admin UI certainly doesn't expose all of BIND's configuration options, but you can use other management methods -- including using [webmin|http://www.webmin.com/osx.html] -- as long as you're careful to do config that Server Admin doesn't understand in files it doesn't look at (e.g. add resource records to the files in/var/named/, not the ones in /var/named/zones/).