I am looking for a very lightweight DNS daemon to run on my CentOS server. It will only be handling a maximum of 5-10 domains and there won't be many queries to it. I have looked at BIND and TinyDNS and a few others but I am stuck on what to use. I am fairly new to DNS configurations in terms of zones etc, although I know how DNS works as a whole, just not on a server level.
The scenario is I bought a domain name from a registrar and I want to push the domain to my server to handle it. I want to setup a couple sub domains that point to IP addresses, not directories.
Lightweight I am talking about less than 50MB of memory usage, disk space isn't an issue however. I would also prefer to have something easy to setup but if I have to do a lot of work manually without any setup scripts or GUI's so be it, it will just take me longer.
Best Answer
You don't seem to need a DNS server for what you have described. Your registrar should provide nameservers - simply point your domain at your at your server's IP address (add an A record). You can then deal with the subdomains on your server without a nameserver (e.g. add virtualhosts in Apache or servers in Nginx). Additionally, if desired you can add CNAMEs on your registrar's nameserver.
If, for some reason you need a nameserver on your server, TinyDNS has a much smaller footprint than Bind and is easy to configure - in this case though, it appears unnecessary.
If you are interested, this article should be applicable in terms of setting up TinyDNS on CentOS: http://www.thatsgeeky.com/2010/12/setting-up-tinydns-on-amazons-linux/
(Some programs related to TinyDNS (e.g. dnscache) can also aid in DNS caching which will yield a small improvement in performance for things such as email delivery and log analysis as well).
TinyDNS does not have a GUI (there are some control panels that support DNS, but installing those is often harder than just installing the DNS server).