Bind9

[Tony Chesser <tmchesser@gmail.com>]

Hello everyone,

Has anyone managed to get BIND9 to work with Cobalt? I have a Raq2 with 256 MB of RAM and an 80 GB HD.  I loaded it with Debian over a year ago, and couldn't get BIND to work.  I've updated repeatedly, with no luck.  I recently wiped the machine and reloaded it.  I installed BIND because I want to use this as a caching DNS server for my local network.  We live in a rural area and have limited bandwidth; a caching DNS and caching proxy server go a long way toward making it bearable and keeping the connectivity bill low.  We usually have < 100 ms ping times to the next gateway (cellular data) and we can flirt with a megabit on speed (so the connections shouldn't be timing out), we're just limited with how much we can use it each month.

More specifically, with a stock configuration of BIND (install it, don't mess with any configs), if I use nslookup or dig, using localhost as the server, I get a very large number of SERVFAIL results.  I can, sometimes, resolve something involving google.com or yahoo.com, but slashdot.org or just about anything else gets a SERVFAIL.  Fiddling with the settings doesn't seem to have any effect.

Note: I am behind a firewall but I allow outbound connections of any kind (no limits).  I do NOT allow other hosts to initiate inbound connections.  But, since my server is querying, any response should be a reply to an internally-initiated connection, which is allowed.

Am I missing something? I don't remember it being this difficult getting BIND working, but it's been a few years since I've heavily used that particular set of skills and I might be a little behind the times.  I have never been able to get it to run, reliably, on my Cobalt.

PowerDNS works, most of the time.  But, BIND is the standard and I'd like to polish my skills on that tool.  I've spent over 20 hours messing with this, over the last year or so, but this has me stumped.

Thanks,

Tony Chesser