Avitar - 3:20 am on Dec 31, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have been developing websites for years, and I have 10+ years of development programming experiance behind me, however I never have set up anything beyond the scope of installing an IIS/Apache web server or related components (such as tomcat, struts, perl, etc.).

I would appreciate any help that is avalible on how to set up windows DNS to function as a name server. I am new to the concepts of 'zoning', 'hosts', 'alieses' etc. related to DNS and BIND.

Pretty much this is the setup:

I have a T1 line and 3 decent boxes that I have at my disposal to fool around with behind an old cisco router. I have 10 domains registered with networksolutions, and about 15 domains my freinds have and I want to point them to my IP's on my T1. I have apache servers and all the related software (jakarta, MySQL, etc.) set up on 2 of the boxes. All the boxes are running windows server 2003. All the sites are transfered and I am running most of the domains as Virtual hosts without a problem. I know it's configured right because I edited the host files on the machines and they point me to the proper place sites.

I do not know how to set up a name server/DNS. I am pretty sure that using the host files is not a good solution because when I work as my own name server I will have problems. I have the 2 required static IP's (one for each apache box) so I just need to know how to set up the name servers / DNS.

I have been serching the web for a 'How To' guide without any success and got the O'Riley Book on BIND and DNS. I even found tools such as dnsstuff.com, I just can't figure out how to add domains, add zoning, & register my name server with the web with other name servers so others can find my websites.

Please Help; A big Thanks in advance.