DNS misc (was: sendmail SMARTHOST)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Derek Martin wrote:
> You have two options here, too: let your name server do all its own look-ups 
> of host that aren't yours, or have it forward requests to your ISP's 
> servers.  Both options have advantages.

   Recent versions of BIND (8.0 and newer, I think) have an option in 
named.conf which controls forwarding.  Useful is the "forward first" option, 
which tells named to first try forwarding the query, but if the forward 
targets fail to resolve the query within a timeout period, try doing an 
iterative query itself.  A "best of both worlds" kind of approach.

> The real down side of forwarding is that DNS search order breaks (this might 
> be fixed in BIND 9, but was definitely broken with BIND 4.x -- I haven't 
> tried it since then).

   This has always worked for me just fine with BIND 8.x.  I'm even kinda 
surprised this would ever care about forwarding, as the domain search list is 
implemented by the resolver library, not named.  But BIND 4.x did a lot of 
funky shit, so I'm not *totally* surprised.  :)

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>