[ILUG] Squid and a caching name server

From: Niall O Broin (niall at domain linux.ie)
Date: Fri 05 Oct 2001 - 11:08:35 IST


I'm trying to revive squid on my machine. It works fine as long as I'm
connected, but when I disconnect from the net it loses the plot and even
after reconnecting it still won't work. The way to resolve it is to restart
squid after connecting to the net but this is a bit of a PITA.

It seems to me that the way to solve this is to set up a local caching
nameserver, something that's been on the long finger for an even longer
time. So, I installed bind on this box but I've one query - from the DNS
HOWTO I have a sample caching named.conf which is rather simple
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
options {
        directory "/var/named";
};
zone "." {
        type hint;
        file "root.hints";
};
zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" {
        type master;
        file "pz/127.0.0";
};
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

and when I installed the bind8 RPM from SuSE 7.2 I got a similar named.conf,
but it has a forwarders line commented out in options. Should I use a
forwarders line or not ? It seems to me that if I don't use one, queries
which can't be resolved from the cache will just be forwarded according to
the current contents of resolv.conf, which may change depending on which ISP
I'm using. My understanding of forwarders is that you'd more commonly use
them in a smallish network where you had a few internal servers, and only
one or two which you actually wanted to do all your external lookups. So
bottom line question - use a forwarders line or not, and if so, how would I
cope with using different providers (I think most provider's name servers
here are farily agnostic about who they will answer queries from, but that
might change)

TIA

Niall



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:12:33 GMT