Bind9 9.2.4 & IPv6 Issues
Morning All,
Yesterday I fixed a long standing problem in my network at Davis Printing,
<http://www.davisprinting.com/>. DNS requests were unbearably slow and
would often timeout. Thanks to the squid proxy server I have in place,
this issue wasn't incredibly taxing on my typical web browser, but was a
problem nonetheless. I also had this same trouble at home,
<http://wohlford.org/>, unfortunately without the aid of a proxy server.
Apparently some time ago, the root DNS servers started serving AAAA
requests. Bind 9.2.4 would often freak out in this scenario and not server
requests in a timely manner. IPv6 was turned on in my Debian Woody box,
but not used. I tried turning IPv6 networking off without success. I also
searched and searched for an answer but never found one. Finally,
yesterday, I came across the answer. Yeah!
I upgraded to Bind 9.3.0 and all is fixed. Immediately, everything worked
as it should. DNS requests were once again lightening fast. I further
configured /etc/default/bind9 that read 'OPTIONS="-u bind"' and added the
'-4' option to say 'OPTIONS="-4 -u bind"'. This runtime switch tells Bind9
to only use IPv4 and never IPv6. I'm not sure it was necessary to specify
that option, but to be safe I went ahead did it.
If it is feasible, I'd recommend moving Bind 9.3 to Woody. I'm fortunately
not the one to make that decision, and most certainly may be providing bad
advice. Thank God for the Debian maintainers, who are our first line of
defense against stupidity!
Cheers,
Jason
--
Jason Wohlford
<jason@wohlford.org>
<http://wohlford.org/>
Reply to: