I want to set up BIND for a private subdomain on a private network, like in the question here: How to configure bind for a private subdomain?
My question is this - should my (linux) router act as the DNS server for this? Or should I have a seperate machine on the network acting as the DNS server? Does it not matter as long as all the machines on the network are configured to resolve to the internal DNS server?
It doesn't matter where you run it as long as it is reachable from the internal machines.
DNS is a very lightweight service, which can easily coexist with many others on a machine.
However, make sure it keeps working. When DNS fails, dozens of things will stop working and you'll be wondering what the heck is going on before you figure out DNS is down.
On a small network I run dnsmasq on the router to provide DNS and DHCP services. It has the advantage of adding DHCP clients to DNS as well as using the /etc/hosts file as a source for local addresses. It is much simpler to configure than bind.
In either case DNS will require minimal resources. dnsmasq runs quite well on on OpenWrt router.
Run it on the router since it's Linux already it will be easy to install BIND. Routers are usually configured to serve DNS.
