Hurricane Electric is an Internet bandwidth provider of some repute. Recently it started offering free DNS hosting via its site at dns.he.net. In this article I look at how you can use HE’s DNS hosting to add redundant slave nameservers for your domain name.

These are the steps that you have to follow:

• First up you have to register for a free account at dns.he.net.
• Allow zone transfers in your nameserver configuration. In BIND you do this by adding the following to your named.conf file:

  options { allow-transfer { 216.218.130.2; }; };

  options { allow-transfer { 216.218.130.2; }; };

  The IP address above is for the server ns1.he.net. This is the server that will pull the DNS records from your master nameserver.

• Prepare your domain name zone file by adding HE’s nameservers. For example in BIND:

  example.com. IN NS ns2.he.net. example.com. IN NS ns3.he.net. example.com. IN NS ns4.he.net. example.com. IN NS ns5.he.net.

  example.com. IN NS ns2.he.net. example.com. IN NS ns3.he.net. example.com. IN NS ns4.he.net. example.com. IN NS ns5.he.net.

  Make sure that your SOA record has your master nameserver in it. For example:

  example.com. IN SOA ns1.example.com. email.example.com. ( 2012051011 14400 3600 604800 14400 )

  example.com. IN SOA ns1.example.com. email.example.com. ( 2012051011 14400 3600 604800 14400 )

• Add your domain name as a slave in dns.he.net. Select ‘Add a new Slave’ from the ‘Zone Functions’ menu to the left. Then in the popup window enter the domain name and the master nameserver’s address and click on “Add slave!”.
  

  Adding a slave zone

• Now you just have to wait a few minutes while HE’s servers pull the records from the master nameserver. Click on the “i” icon next to your domain name to see the records.

That’s it! Now you have redundant slave nameservers for your domain name and all for free!