Secondary/slave DNS server

[Barry Margolin]

In article <38A44E9C.7D512A12 at excite.com.nospam>,
Irfan  <scarlethawk at excite.com.nospam> wrote:
>I am trying to setup a some sort of DNS server at our site.  What I need
>from this server is to keep a copy of all DNS information onsite so that
>our machines don't have to go to our ISP's servers for every little DNS
>query.   I will not be updating any DNS information on this server, and
>will like to keep it updated and synchronized with my ISP's DNS
>servers.   Caching server will probably not work unless I can somehow
>cache all the DNS information from the ISP.
>
>The "secondary" server will just have a copy of all DNS infomation at my
>ISP (or anybody on the Internet) servers, and can answer DNS queries
>without going to the ISP  everytime.  Again, I will not need to update
>any DNS informaton, just need a local copy.

You want your server to have copies of *all* DNS information for the entire
Internet?  That's simply not possible.  You would have to perform millions
of zone transfers, and the storage requirements would be enormous.  Someone
earlier today wrote that their one server hosts 220,000 domains and it
takes them an hour to load them into named's memory; if you could store all
the zones on the Internet on your system and load them in, it would
probably take days for named to start up.

Furthermore, many sites restrict zone transfers, so you won't be able to
get copies of their zones.

Stick with caching -- it's a tried-and-true mechanism that works well.  If
you want a local copy of anything, make your server secondary for your own
domains.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
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