Force TTL on a Caching Name Server

[howting at gmail.com]

> So why not do it correctly and bypass the caching nameserver?  You
> can specify the nameserver to use in a DNS request.
>
> dig @ns1.example.com example2.com

We monitor many domains and they all have different DNS configurations,
so it's infeasible for us to do that. It's easier (and more reliable)
to let bind do the name resolving rather than to reinvent the wheels.

I was tempted to set max-cache-ttl to 0 to disable caching completely
so that we can check dns servers on every monitoring check. That is
probably too aggressive so we dropped that idea.

Thanks everyone for the help and suggestions. This is one of the few
friendly + helpful newsgroups I have participated :)