admin guide dns and bind

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Sat Nov 24 13:14:34 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 17:22 +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I have 'completed' the DNS and BIND section. I have not read over what
> I have done, planning to do that Saturday morning since I am a day
> ahead of every ne else.
> 
> The structure is terrible...maybe someone else will fix that ;).
> 
> Maybe this section could be left out, I have only detailed how to
> setup and configure when compiling bind from source. I tried a 'yum
> install bind' this morning and couldn't even find where it put
> named.conf...so I figured I did not have enough time to learn all over
> again before saturday.

Unfortunately, this usage flies in the face of all the assumptions and
guidelines for Fedora technical documentation.  The section *must* be
rewritten to deal with administrators doing 'yum install bind' and
proceeding from there.  If you don't have time to fix it now, that's
perfectly OK.  It just needs to be fixed before publication, or its
inclusion deferred.

Please remember, all, that one of Fedora's strong points is its robust
software management capability via RPM and yum.  Any and all procedures
that you are writing for the AG need to use Fedora "best practices,"
which include using yum to install and remove software.  When we don't
use our own best practices in documentation, it sends a signal that (A)
best practices don't matter (bad!), or (B) we don't trust them (worse!).

As guide lead, Bart will undoubtedly be looking at these topics as we
prepare to go to "second-draft" phase (or whatever the next phase is).

> Also, what is the policy on linking to external websites? I have a few
> links to other sites, such as http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns ...
> these sites may not be around as long as the guide though.

I would think that external links need to satisfy some definition of
"authoritative," but I'm not sure what that definition entails.  Linking
to Joe Public's home website that is a checklist of how to run DNS on
Gentoo is probably not a great choice.  Linking to a website by a
recognized authority (such as a published author, e.g. the link you
provided above) is much better.

> I have included a "references and thanks" section at the end. These
> were the books and resources I used when I wrote the original paper
> that I used for this guide, however that knowledge is now common to me
> - so are the links needed? I don't think there should be a list like
> this in an admin guide anyway...but I don't want to take credit for
> someone elses work. If it shouldn't be there (I'm not sure it needs to
> be since it is common knowledge to me now).
> 
> Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Bibliographic resources are great.  They should be collected at the end
of the Administration Guide, set out by section per topic if necessary,
or simply note in a paragraph that the following resources pertained to
topic X.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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