On Aug 20, 2006, at 7:43 AM, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Hi,
In the (perhaps mistaken) notion that I am doing DNS lookups on sites
that I always use and seem to take a long time, so would like a
permanent cache, I installed bind9 on Sid.
I changed Firehol and added the port 53 server/client:
...
server_named_ports="tcp/53 udp/53"
client_named_ports="default 53"
...
server named accept
...
I did not change anything else.
Now how to I tell whether my strategy worked?
Googling did not give me an answer, that I know of.
H
You'd have to point /etc/resolv.conf to 127.0.0.1 to use your local
nameserver instead of the ISP's or whoever else's you were using. Just
loading a local DNS server won't make your local resolver use it.
There's a number of reasons caching won't help in general, such as: If
you regularly reboot your machine, your cache is gone. If the TTL times
out on the Zone, that zone's cache is gone. If the DNS entries are
dynamic in any way for that zone, the cache is useless.
It's unlikely that it will help you much -- unless your upstream link to
your ISP is so slow or their DNS server is so slow that you see a
noticeable difference in response times. Your machine running BIND
still has to go out and query the roots (well that's "permanently"
cached in a configuration file, unless things change), query the GTLD
servers (in the case of typical US domain names, like .com and .net, for
example), then query the delegated DNS servers for that zone.
You should do some real network engineering and measure response times
for your ISP's DNS server using "dig" and then yours and really compare,
instead of just guessing... if you're truly going for top speed.
Plus, most of the slowdowns today aren't the DNS of the site you're
going to, it's the stupid ad-counting stuff embedded in the web pages.
If you don't use and ad-blocker proxy or something similar to throw out
ad server's addresses/names you'll probably note that you regularly see
things like "ads.doubleclick.net" being looked up by your browser, and
other retarded stuff like that, that doesn't add any value to your
viewing of the website, only to the owner of the site. And lately they
take the longest to respond of almost everything else on the web pages
out there on most commercial sites.