So, I'm thinking of setting up a server on my own. Not that I don't love astahost, but I'd let to get more practical experience. Plus, my college gives us fully routable unique IPs, so I figured I'd take advantage of this. The one hangup, as far as I can tell, is that I need a nameserver to allow my domain name to point to my computer. So I was wondering what is required to create a name server. Is i t something that anyone can do? Or does it require registration? And if it's something anyone can do, as I believe it is, how do I go about setting one up?

~Viz

The following are the steps you need to take to start using those nameservers with your main domain.accounts:

1-Register your reseller nameservers at your domain registrar.

2-Modify your domain's nameservers

1- Go to your registrar and look for "register nameservers" page. Follow the instructions. If registering fails with error "could not verify IP addresses" or similar, try again the next day. Also note that registering nameservers doesn't mean registering a new domain, you are basically just letting the DNS databases know that there are some services with individual names connected to your domain name. (Registering nameservers will not cost you anything).

2-In order to transfer your domain onto the new servers, you will need to change your domain name's nameservers with the nameservers you've created in the step above.

Set it to use your reseller nameservers (ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com). These are the nameservers that will be listed when people are doing a Whois on your domain "yourdomain.com".

Hope this help.
Cheers

Thanks, but more of what I'm looking for is not how to point my registrar to my nameservers, but to create them in the first place. See, right now I don't have machines ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com, nor am I sure what they need to have to work properly.

~Viz

is this the kind of thing you are trying to do? http://www.howtoforge.com/debian_bind9_master_slave_system.

i believe it is as easy as finding a spare computer and set it up as a dns! i've never tried it before, but how hard can it be (famous last words )

good luck
-jimmy

You just need a nameserver...Bind 9 is the defacto choice out there for high performance and reliability, but Windows Server has a DNS service with a GUI driven configuration.

Thanks guys. Two more questions, though.
1) The two nameservers (ns1 and ns2) need to be seperate machines, correct?
2) How do the names ns1.domain.tld and ns2.domain.tld propogate across the web if the nameservers are responsible for propogating things beneath them across the web.

~Viz

You only need to specify one nameserver: the one you're running. The other is designed as a failover backup.

You really should read an overview of how the DNS system works to answer question #2. It's way too much to type and I probably wouldn't do as good a job explaining it as a formal guide.