8. Questions and Answers

Please read this section before mailing me.

1. My named wants a named.boot file

   You are reading the wrong HOWTO. Please see the old version of this HOWTO, which convers bind 4, at http://www.math.uio.no/~janl/DNS/

2. How do use DNS from inside a firewall?

   A couple of hints: `forwarders', `slave', and have a look in the literature list at the end of this HOWTO. You will probably also need

   ---

     query-source port 53;
     
   

   ---

   inside the options part of the named.conf file as suggested in the example caching section.

3. How do I make DNS rotate through the available addresses for a service, say www.busy.site to obtain a load balancing effect, or similar?

   Make several A records for www.busy.site and use bind 4.9.3 or later. Then bind will round-robin the answers. It will not work with earlier versions of bind.

4. I want to set up DNS on a (closed) intranet. What do I do?

   You drop the root.hints file and just do zone files. That also means you don't have to get new hint files all the time.

5. How do I set up a secondary (slave) name server?

   If the primary/master server has address 127.0.0.1 you put a line like this in the named.conf file of your secondary:

   ---

     zone "linux.bogus" {
           type slave;
           file "sz/linux.bogus";
           masters { 127.0.0.1; };
     };
     
   

   ---

   You may list several alternate master servers the zone can be copied from inside the masters list, separated by ';' (semicolon).

6. I want bind running when I'm disconnected from the net.

   There are two items regarding this:

   • I have received this mail from Ian Clark <ic@deakin.edu.au> where he explains his way of doing this:

     I run named on my 'Masquerading' machine here. I have 
     two root.hints files, one called root.hints.real which contains 
     the real root server names and the other called root.hints.fake 
     which contains...
     
     ----
     ; root.hints.fake
     ; this file contains no information
     ----
     
     When I go off line I copy the root.hints.fake file to root.hints and
     restart named.
     
     When I go online I copy root.hints.real to root.hints and restart
     named.
     
     This is done from ip-down & ip-up respectively.
     
     The first time I do a query off line on a domain name named doesn't
     have details for it puts an entry like this in messages..
     
     Jan 28 20:10:11 hazchem named[10147]: No root nameserver for class IN
     
     which I can live with.
              
     It certainly seems to work for me. I can use the nameserver for
     local machines while off the 'net without the timeout delay for
     external domain names and I while on the 'net queries for external
     domains work normally
     

   • I have also received information about how bind interacts with NFS and the portmapper on a mostly offline machine from Karl-Max Wanger:

     
     I use to run my own named on all my machines which are only
     occasionally connected to the Internet by modem. The nameserver only
     acts as a cache, it has no area of authority and asks back for
     everything at the nameservers in the root.cache file. As is usual with
     Slackware, it is started before nfsd and mountd.
     
     With one of my machines (a Libretto 30 notebook) I had the problem
     that sometimes I could mount it from another system connected to my
     local LAN, but most of the time it didn't work.  I had the same effect
     regardless of using PLIP, a PCMCIA ethernet card or PPP over a serial
     interface.
     
     After some time of guessing and experimenting I found out that
     apparently named messed with the process of registration nfsd and
     mountd have to carry out with the portmapper upon startup (I start
     these daemons at boot time as usual). Starting named after nfsd and
     mountd eliminated this problem completely.
     
     As there are no disadvantages to expect from such a modified boot
     sequence I'd advise everybody to do it that way to prevent potential
     trouble.
     

7. Where does the caching name server store its cache? Is there any way I can control the size of the cache?

   The cache is completely stored in memory, it is not written to disk at any time. Every time you kill named the cache is lost. The cache is not controllable in any way. named manages it according to some simple rules and that is it. You cannot control the cache or the cache size in any way for any reason. If you want to you can ``fix'' this by hacking named. This is however not recommended.

8. Does named save the cache between restarts? Can I make it save it?

   No, named does not save the cache when it dies. That means that the cache must be built anew each time you kill and restart named. There is no way to make named save the cache in a file. If you want you can ``fix'' this by hacking named. This is however not recommended.