8.5 Resolving Hosts

Now let's turn our attention to data describing hosts on a network. One of the most fundamental services provided in any TCP/IP network is the resolution of machine names to network addresses. The most widespread mechanism for looking up IP addresses is the Domain Name System (DNS). Again, coverage of DNS is beyond the scope of this book; for more information, see DNS and BIND, Fourth Edition, by Cricket Liu and Paul Albitz (O'Reilly).

Chapter 1 already made it clear that LDAP is not a replacement for a specialized directory service such as DNS. However, you can use LDAP effectively as a backend storage system for DNS zone files. Stig Venaas has written such a patch for Bind 9 using its new simplified database interface (SDB). The latest release of the patch for BIND 9.1 (or later) and the necessary schema file for OpenLDAP 2 can be obtained from http://www.venaas.no/ldap/bind-sdb/. For performance reasons, I recommend that you obtain the latest patch, rather than using the one included in the contrib/ subdirectory of the latest BIND 9 release.

Venaas has included a brief list of the steps necessary for integrating LDAP-sdb support in Bind 9. Here are the instructions contained in the INSTALL file of the ldap-sdb archive:

Copy the ldap.c source file to the bin/named/ subdirectory of the BIND 9 source tree.
Copy the ldap.h header file to the bin/named/include/ subdirectory of the BIND 9 source tree.
Edit bin/named/Makefile.in and add the following lines:
```
DDRIVER_OBJS = ldapdb.@O@
DDRVIVER_SRCS = ldapdb.c
DDRIVER_LIBS = -lldap -llber
```
The Makefile variables may already exist; if this is the case, simply append the references to the LDAP files to the existing definitions. You may also need to add the path to the LDAP include files and libraries to the DDRIVER_INCLUDES and DDRIVER_LIBS respectively.
Edit bin/named/main.c and add the line #include <ldapdb.h> below #include "xxdb.h"; add the line ldapdb_init( ); below xxdb_init( ); and finally, add ldapdb_clear( ); below xxdb_clear( );.

After making these changes, you're ready to build the LDAP-enabled named binary by executing ./configure && make && /bin/su -c "make install". It is a good idea to ensure that the new server is working with an existing set of zone files before continuing. Here is a zone file for the plainjoe.org domain; it contains four hosts, localhost, dns1, ldap, and ahab:

plainjoe.org. IN SOA dns1.plainjoe.org. root.dns.plainjoe.org. (
                     3         ; Serial
                     10800     ; Refresh after 3 hours
                     3600      ; Retry after 1 hour
                     604800    ; expire after 1 week
                     86400 )   ; minimum TTL of 1 day
; Name Servers
plainjoe.org.               IN     NS     dns1.plainjoe.org.
      
; Addresses for local printers
localhost.plainjoe.org.          IN     A     127.0.0.1
dns1.plainjoe.org.               IN     A     192.168.1.10
ldap.plainjoe.org.               IN     A     192.168.1.70
ahab.plainjoe.org.               IN     A     192.168.1.80

Figure 8-6 shows the schema for the structural dNSZone object class. This schema allows you to store DNS records in the directory. All of the attributes used to represent the various DNS records (MX, A, PTR, etc.) are optional, which means that a dNSZone entry can represent any type of DNS record.

Figure 8-6. The dNSZone object class required for the Bind 9 LDAP-sdb backend

I have chosen to place all plainjoe.org hosts in the hosts organizational unit. The following LDIF entry represents the A record for the host ahab.plainjoe.org:

dn: relativeDomainName=ahab,ou=hosts,dc=plainjoe,dc=org
aRecord: 192.168.1.80
objectClass: dNSZone
relativeDomainName: ahab
dNSTTL: 86400
zoneName: plainjoe.org

After placing your DNS zone data into the LDAP directory, you need to tell the named server how to locate the zone information. The database keyword specifies the SDB type holding the zone information; in this case, you're using an LDAP database. Any remaining arguments after the database type are passed directly to the SDB backend module. Here, you use an LDAP URI to define the directory server's hostname and the base search suffix. The final number (172800) specifies the default time-to-live (TTL) for entries that do not possess a dNSTTL attribute value.

zone "plainjoe.org" in {
    type master;
    database "ldap ldap://192.168.1.70/ou=hosts,dc=plainjoe,dc=org 172800";
};

You can now use the dig utility to test the new LDAP-served DNS zone. Figure 8-7 describes what will happen when the dig or nslookup tools are executed.

$ dig ahab.plainjoe.org +short
; <<>> DiG 9.1.0 <<>> ahab.plainjoe.org +short
;; global options: printcmd
192.168.1.80

Figure 8-7. Retrieving zone information using LDAP lookups in Bind 9

The zone2ldap tool included with the Bind distribution provides a quick way to transfer existing zone files into an LDAP directory. Newer versions of this utility can also be downloaded from Venaas's web site. I decided against using it because it creates an entry for each component of the FQDN for each host. For example, the host ahab.plainjoe.org results in three entries: one for dc=org, one for dc=plainjoe,dc=org, and one for relativeDomainName=ahab,dc=plainjoe,dc=org. For more information, refer to the zone2ldap manpage.

[ Team LiB ]