From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 28 17:14:52 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id RAA13022 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 28 May 1997 17:14:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from xmission.xmission.com (softweyr@xmission.xmission.com [198.60.22.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA13017 for ; Wed, 28 May 1997 17:14:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from softweyr@localhost) by xmission.xmission.com (8.8.5/8.7.5) id SAA29260; Wed, 28 May 1997 18:14:37 -0600 (MDT) From: Wes Peters - Softweyr LLC Message-Id: <199705290014.SAA29260@xmission.xmission.com> Subject: Re: DNS cache? To: andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu (Annelise Anderson) Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 18:14:36 -0600 (MDT) Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Annelise Anderson" at May 28, 97 12:56:41 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > 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