Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 18:14:36 -0600 (MDT) From: Wes Peters - Softweyr LLC <softweyr@xmission.com> To: andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu (Annelise Anderson) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: DNS cache? Message-ID: <199705290014.SAA29260@xmission.xmission.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970528125023.6115A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> from "Annelise Anderson" at May 28, 97 12:56:41 pm
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> I agreed in a moment of weakness to take over a small mailing list
> (about 200 names), using majordomo. Outgoing mail to the list is
> rather slow (it takes maybe 20-30 minutes) and I've heard about
> running a "DNS cache" to speed things up. I suppose this works
> by recording the ip addresses associated with the domains when they
> are acquired from (in this case) Stanford's DNS server, so they
> can be looked up locally. Is there a software package for this?
Sure -- the standard BIND that comes with your 2.2.1 system will do
this just fine. The O'Reilly book "DNS and BIND" has an excellent
section on setting up a ccache-only name server.
Basically, you want to configure bind to *not* be primary or secondary
for any domains. It understands how to find the root-level name
servers, and will cache everything it finds.
The good news is that the FreeBSD 2.2 distribution comes with named
basically setup to be a cache-only server. You need to do the following
as root:
cd /etc/namedb
sh make-localhost
edit /etc/sysconfig (or /etc/rc.conf, if 2.2.2)
change namedflags to those suggested by the comment
as in "-b /etc/namedb/named.boot"
That should do it. Remember your gateway to the internet must allow
your new nameserver UDP and TCP access on port 42 or it will not work.
> This machine has FreeBSD 2.2.1 installed on it; it's just a
> Pentium 90 with 32 megs ram, but I think it could do better than
> it's been doing....I found bulk_mailer and installed it but haven't
> yet figured out how to set it up.
You'll want to monitor the size of the cache vs. available memory. If
you're only handling 200 addresses, this won't be a problem at all, but
name servers have a tendency to grow their caches unbounded and
eventually consume all RAM and swap. Rebooting once a month or so
might be an acceptable alternative if it eats the system too badly.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.xmission.com/~softweyr softweyr@xmission.com
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