My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4

I set up authoritative nameservers at home using unbound, which appears to be considerably easier than configuring BIND, but I still can't say that I fully understand it. DNS (and networking in general) is a bit of a dark art.

I've been running BIND at home since the mid 90's when I had ISDN. The O'Reilly "DNS and BIND" book was my go-to guide when I got started.

It Still Does Nothing.

The sheer luxury of two B channels at 64kBps each and if you were cunning, the D channel at 16k (I wasn't cunning and didn't bother)! Yay, double phone charges if you raised the second channel. That was a BRI. A PRI was lots of channels (30) and an even more eye watering bill.

A customer dumped their BRI that was acting as a backup to SIP n that about six months ago. That's the last one I know of.

A trick some ISPs used in the 90's was a "data over voice" call, which ran at 56K but was charged voice rates instead of data rates. That meant the call was generally free. The improved latency of ISDN made a huge difference compared to a 56K modem.