So I was about to help Josef to setup his zone file for his domain seger.nu(used by named ) which I host in my DNS server. I was confused with the entries in his file and had to look in the one for my domain. It was still not clear but looking the man pages of named and some of the RFC’s refered there I started to get a grip again about the situation.

This is how my zone file looks like for yelloworb.com:

$TTL    3600

@       IN      SOA     ns.yelloworb.com.       karl-petter.home.se. (
                                200311201       ; serial
                                1800            ; refresh every 30 min
                                300             ; retry every 5 min
                                604800          ; expire after a week
                                86400 )         ; minimum of a day
                TXT             "YellowOrb DNS"
        IN      NS      ns.yelloworb.com.
        IN      NS      gatekeeper.home.pp.se.

        IN      MX      10      mail
        IN      A       212.181.53.31
	
mail    IN      CNAME   yelloworb.com.

ns      IN      CNAME   yelloworb.com.

ftp     IN      CNAME   yelloworb.com.
	
; some virtual webservers

www     IN      CNAME   yelloworb.com.

ao      IN      CNAME   www.yelloworb.com.

The main thing that I was confused was how the MX record would look like. Some googling didnt help much but going back to the roots and reading some of teh RFC’s explained it all, specifically RFC974

Josef zone file looks like this now and I’m quite sure it will work:

$TTL    3600
@       IN      SOA     ns.yelloworb.com.       karl-petter.home.se.    (
                                200311201       ; serial
                                1800            ; refresh every 30 min
                                300             ; retry every 5 min
                                604800          ; expire after a week
                                86400 )         ; minimum of a day
                TXT             "Seger.NU DNS"
	
; name servers for seger.nu
        IN      NS      ns.yelloworb.com.
        IN      NS      gatekeeper.home.pp.se.
        IN      MX      10      mail
	
seger.nu.       IN      A       81.225.2.69
	
www     IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

mail    IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

josef   IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

anki    IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

privat  IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

ftp     IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

alexander       IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

telnet  IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

malin   IN      CNAME   seger.nu.

So now all should be setup right for josef to recieve emails at seger.nu directly and not mail.seger. nu but the mailserver has to be configured as well as this page explains.