Install a local DNS resolver on Ubuntu 20.04

BIND(Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is a free open-source domain name server that can be installed on Linux. Having your local DNS server can be useful for several reasons:

• Faster DNS Queries
• Privacy
• Use as a mail server
• Blacklisting using DNS
• Use alongside your VPN server

In this tutorial, we will go through installing and configuring BIND DNS server to be used as a local resolver.

Update packages 
First, let's open up the terminal by selecting on the bottom left on the Ubuntu desktop and search for terminal up top to open up a terminal session.

Next, let's make sure our system packages are up to date

sudo apt update

Installing Bind DNS resolver

Now let’s install BIND with the following command below.

sudo apt install bind9 bind9utils bind9-doc bind9-host

Once installed, use the following command to check the version of BIND

named -v

Once installed, make sure to start/enable BIND with systemctl. The enable command will make sure BIND starts up at boot.

sudo systemctl start named
sudo systemctl enable named

After that, use systemctl to check the status of BIND

sudo systemctl status named

Setting up BIND as your local resolver

By default, BIND is already setup to be a  DNS resolver for the localhost and local network but it is not set as your DNS server on your Shell. We need to change this to set BIND as your default resolver. We will do this by editing the following file

sudo nano /etc/systemd/resolved.conf

Just as the above screenshots, set DNS=127.0.0.1.

Next, we will need to restart the resolver service.

sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved

Then, we will check the status to make sure our localhost address is used as the resolver.

systemd-resolve –status

Next, let's install dig to check A records

sudo apt install dnsutils

After dnsutils is installed, use dig to query a website. In this example I use shells.com

dig A shells.com

Then check syslogs to see if the localhost 127.0.0.1 actually queried for shells.com

sudo tail /ar/log/syslogs

And that’s it. You now have your own local DNS server/resolver using BIND. If you would like to learn more, about BIND please click on the link below.

BIND 9