Bypassing DNS?

[Neil Schelly]

On Thursday 23 February 2006 12:41 pm, Paul Lussier wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Is there a way to tell the resolver libs that if you can't connect to
> the DNS service, to just abort and return? Setting /etc/nsswitch.conf to
>
>   hosts: dns [unavail=continue|return] files
>
> still seems to result in a slight hang while the lookup occurs...

That slight hang would be the timeout of the DNS request.  I'm guessing it's 
about 2 seconds.  If you want more immediate response, I would suggest 
running a local instance of BIND as a caching server.  It can even just 
forward all requests to your primary DNS servers if you'd like.

The benefit of doing this is that you can set more aggressive timeouts on your 
local instance without affecting other users of the "real" DNS server.  Then, 
your resolv.conf can point to localhost and your nsswitch will fail back to 
files more quickly.

Would that work?
-N