Force Clients to *always* use authoritative

[Bill Larson]

On Dec 18, 2006, at 4:12 PM, Karl R. Balsmeier wrote:

> Peter Dambier wrote:
>
>> Karl R. Balsmeier wrote:
>>
>>> Is there a specific way to set a name server so that clients are  
>>> always
>>> *forced* to use an autoritative name server?
>>>
>>> UltraDNS and some others have mentioned little features they  
>>> have, but
>>> it only hints at the possibility that somewhere in the DNS spec.
>>
>> Just switch off recursion on your server then they are forced to  
>> either
>> choose an open resolver or run their own namserver as resolver.
>>
>> If they delete any forwarders from their /etc/named.conf then they do
>> query only authoritative nameservers starting with the rootservers  
>> and
>> rarely ever touch your nameserver most of the time.
>>
> well, basically we are trying to make sure that the clients do not use
> cached lookups...
>
> We were just advised:

Advised of what?  By whom?

> If so you could use max-cache-ttl and max-ncache-ttl with a very  
> low ttl like 1 second.  Although then you still have a problem with  
> the client itself caching the lookup.

If you are not going to provide cached DNS information to your users  
why are you running a DNS server at all?  I thought that this caching  
was one of the reasons that you provided a DNS server for your  
users.  (This is ignoring running an authoritative DNS service for  
your zones, and this should/could be set up to be non-recursive.)

I agree with Peter.  If you don't want to provided any cached  
information, just shut off recursion and force the systems that use  
your server to configure their own DNS server.

Bill Larson