bind9: example.com works, www.example.com doesnt, and how to block urls

[shwick]

1)
I was following a guide to setup bind again after I formatted to Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS.
http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/dns-configuration.html#dns-primarymaster-configuration

I can get my domain example.com to resolve but I want "www.example.com" to resolve to the actual domain on the web.

I don't have a webserver setup on my domain at the moment so I would rather it resolve properly.

So "ping example.com" works and resolves to my local address but "ping www.example.com" gives "ping: unknown host www.example.com".

Here is the file db.example.com,

;
; BIND data file for example.com
;
$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     ns.example.com. root.example.com. (
                              9         ; Serial
                         604800         ; Refresh
                          86400         ; Retry
                        2419200         ; Expire
                         604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      ns.example.com.
@       IN      A       10.11.12.1
;www    IN      A       10.11.12.1
ns      IN      A       10.11.12.1

I tried adding in a www entry but it only resolves to the same local ip as example.com so I commented it out.

2)
I am planning on adding all of the urls from the ad block site http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt to bind so as to block them on my network.

So how would I add this list to bind?

[JeoSaurus]

Hi Shwick!

"I tried adding in a www entry but it only resolves to the same local ip as example.com"

^This is the expected behavior here. On the web server side of things, you would want to make sure that apache (or your web server of choice) resolves both example.com and www.example.com to the same place.

The OTHER option you might be looking for is a 'CNAME' record. Try something like: www IN CNAME example.com. The list you linked is in the format of a 'hosts' file. You don't need to run BIND for that, you can simply add the entire list to your /etc/hosts file on any client machine (/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts on windows).

BUT if you want to add the list to BIND and point your clients to that server for DNS resolution, that would work too. You would do it the same way you added your example.com zone. Once you have the steps down, you could probably script it pretty easily, or you might be able to find an existing script to create the zones for you.

I hope this helps!