pdnsd problems

[Greg Norris <haphazard@kc.rr.com>]

I'm having some problems getting a reliable pdnsd setup, which I was
hoping (obviously! ;-) that someone here could help me out with.  The
symptom is that occasionally it stops resolving addresses (probably
just uncached ones?), and pdnsd-ctl shows the server as unavailable.

At first I thought the ping test might be failing, but I don't find any
messages in the debug log which indicate this.  It seems unlikely in
any event, as the DNS server is a cable router which is directly
connected via a 3-foot cable.

One thing I did notice in the log is that pdnsd seems to be querying
external DNS for the local system name (glitch.localdomain).  I see a
lot of entries like the following... in particular, there seems to be a
storm of them just before it thinks DNS is down.

   2 02/10 22:08:01| Received query.
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Questions are:
   2 02/10 22:08:01|       qc=IN (1), qt=AAAA (28), query="glitch."
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Starting cached resolve for: glitch., query AAAA
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Trying name servers.
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Server 192.168.0.1 returned error code: unknown domain
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Cacheing domain glitch. negative
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Query to 192.168.0.1 succeeded.
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Outbound msg len 24, tc=0, rc="unknown domain"
   2 02/10 22:08:01| Answering to: 127.0.0.1, source address: 127.0.0.1

Shouldn't pdnsd be getting information on the local name from
/etc/hosts?  I don't think it should be passed to the external DNS, at
any rate.

The contents of pdnsd.conf are listed below.  The second and third
server entries shouldn't be relevant, as they're only reachable when
I'm VPN'd to work.

I'd be grateful for any insights and/or suggestions.  Thanx!


----- <pdnsd.conf> -----
global {
	perm_cache=2048;
	cache_dir="/var/cache/pdnsd";
	max_ttl=604800;
	run_as="pdnsd";
	strict_setuid=on;
	paranoid=on;
	status_ctl=on;
#	server_port=53;
	server_ip="127.0.0.1";
}

server {
	ip="192.168.0.1";
	label="router";
	timeout=30;
	interval=30;
	preset=on;
	uptest=ping;
	ping_timeout=100;
	purge_cache=off;
}

server {
	ip="144.229.81.71";
	label="work1";
	timeout=30;
	interval=30;
	preset=off;
	uptest=if;
	interface="nlv0";
	purge_cache=off;
}

server {
	ip="144.229.84.184";
	label="work2";
	timeout=30;
	interval=30;
	preset=off;
	uptest=if;
	interface="nlv0";
	purge_cache=off;
}

source {
	ttl=86400;
	owner="localhost.";
#	serve_aliases=on;
	file="/etc/hosts";
}
----- <end pdnsd.conf> -----