Set up private, internal DNS for your VPC using Route 53 and unbound

CRITICAL: AWS now offers internal VPC DNS! Below is no longer necessary AFAIK. Woo hoo!

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/11/05/amazon-route-53-now-supports-private-dns-with-amazon-vpc/

BELOW IS DEPRECATED!

1. create a Hosted Zone, something like "mydomain.internal"
2. get the IP addresses of the name servers assigned to your new zone
1. STRIP OFF '.' at the end of the name servers or BOOM!
3.  create a new DHCP Options Set
1. add the IP addresses you gathered above to the domain-name-servers field
4. Change DHCP Options Set of your VPC by right-clicking it
5. run sudo dhclient on any already-running instance in the VPC to pick up changes
6. debug changes have taken place on an instance: cat /etc/resolv.conf

RECOMMEND ALTERNATE SOLUTION: here's a sample unbound.conf I ended up using for a DNS forwarding server within my VPC -- see comments below. I adjusted the "options set" to point at this DNS server instead, 10.0.0.254 in my case.

NOTE: Btw, unbound is available under "epel" yum repo.

server:
        verbosity: 1
        interface: 0.0.0.0
        access-control: 10.0.0.0/16 allow
forward-zone:
       name: "mydomain.internal"
       forward-host: ns-123.awsdns-12.com
       forward-host: ns-234.awsdns-34.biz
       forward-host: ns-567.awsdns-56.net
       forward-host: ns-890.awsdns-78.org
       forward-first: no 

See also:

unbound, custom records:  http://sysadminandnetworking.blogspot.com/2014/05/unbound-custom-records.html

unbound, default to google: http://sysadminandnetworking.blogspot.com/2014/05/unbound-default-to-googles-dns.html