www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/sexy-backend-change-dns-support.mdwn

[[!meta title="Sexy example: Small backend change and you are managing DNS"]]

## Introduction

This previous article about
[[bootstrapping a network with sexy|sexy-network-bootstrap]]
explained in detail how to manage a network and how to configure
it with cdist.

This article shows you what needs to be changed to support DNS resolution
in addition to the configured DHCP service.

## Background

I am using [dnsmasq](http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html) on my
router, which can act as a DNS and DHCP server. DNS A entries can be added
to the configuration using the **host-record** command.

## The change

Taking the previously net-ipv4 backend, 
[the required change is very small](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=sexy-database;a=commit;h=e7f45dccc1feace042bec1549079f073aa476739):

    -        line="dhcp-host=${mac},$ipv4a,$hostname"
    -        echo "${line}" >> "${tmp}"
    +        echo "dhcp-host=${mac},$ipv4a,$hostname" >> "${tmp}"
    +        echo "host-record=$hostname,$fqdn,$ipv4a" >> "${tmp}"


Thanks to the modular configuration and the easiness of both sexy and cdist,
this change and a call to **sexy net-ipv4 apply --all** is everything that is needed
to make dnsmasq serve internal DNS names.

## The result

What this article should show is that whatever you do in the backend, sexy is not affected
at all and you can dramatically change whatever happens on **sexy net-ipv4 apply --all**.

You can browse 
[the sexy database](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=sexy-database;a=summary)
as well as
the [cdist configuration](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=cdist-nico;a=summary).

[[!tag cdist net sexy unix]]