Re: To the bind maintainer

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 05:51:25PM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:
> 
> Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > Actually, I'm kinda confused about all this talk about running BIND
> > on personal machines (notebooks?) and by newbies. Why on earth would
> > you run BIND on a notebook[1]? Why on earth would a (relatively) new
> > Linux user have BIND installed? (Actually, now that I think about
> > it, why is there a "task-name-server" package?)
>
> All machines should run a named.

wrong. every *network* should run at least one name server, but not
every machine on every network needs to.

> It's a new phenomenon that lots of machines on the net are windows
> or mac machines for which there just isn't a good name server
> implementation.

so they should use the designated name server on their local network.

> Previously name servers were largely only for serving remote clients.

and also to serve internal hosts which weren't running a nameserver.
that's the whole point of bind's caching capability.

> There's really little logical reason to use a dedicated machine set
> up to be a name server for lots of machines when those machines are
> perfectly capable of doing that work for themselves.

consistency is one very good, logical reason.

if every machine on the local network is running a caching nameserver,
then they WILL end up with different data. e.g. machine A does a lookup
for a hostname and caches the result. a few minutes later, the dns data
for that host is changed. then machine B does a lookup for it, and gets
the new data.

what you have now is a situation where something works on one machine
(machine B) but not on another (machine A). this kind of mysterious
fault will almost certainly take longer to diagnose and fix because you
will probably waste some time checking/comparing the configuration on
both machines before you finally realise what the problem really is.

a network needs one or more name servers. it doesn't need every machine
to be it's own nameserver.

craig

--
craig sanders