Performance tuning bind

[Barry Margolin]

In article <Pine.BSF.3.96.1000228152148.16913A-100000 at hiway1.exit109.com>,
Michael Cunningham  <malice at exit109.com> wrote:
>I am having some problems with some very high volume mailservers 
>we have that have been failing to get responses from our dns servers
>before udp timeouts occur. We have a Ultra 5 with 128 meg of ram which is
>basically totally idle which is serving dns only. The other dns server is
>on our outbound mailserver. They were both 4.9.4 which came with Solaris.
>We upgraded to  8.2.2p5 in the hope that this would help our dns timeouts
>but no luck. It has gotten a bit better though. Both Solaris 2.6 systems
>are fully patched with the latest clusters. Is there something I can do to 
>a system to improve it dns serving ability or performance tune bind
>somehow?  The Ultra 5 system is basically idle 99% of the time. Could
>it be something else? 

It's probably something else.  An idle 128-meg Ultra 5 should have no
problem as a DNS server.

>These are the errors I am getting from communigate pro MTA. Any ideas?
>
>14:58:04.57 4 SMTP-48450(memailin1.messagereach.com) failed to find
>relays: no DNS MX-data returned
>14:58:04.97 4 SMTP-48451(post.pl) failed to find relays: no DNS MX-data
>returned

Neither memailin1.messagereach.com nor post.pl have MX records.  They have
A records, though, so mail should be able to go through.

>14:58:05.02 3 DNR got response from [137.236.4.7] for an unqueued request
>15019; discarded

Is this your DNS server's address?  If not, I don't understand why your
machine was sending DNS queries to it.  Your mail server should be querying
your BIND servers, which should be recursing to query the remote servers.

>14:58:05.12 4 SMTP-48452(thc.com) failed to find relays: no DNS MX-data
>returned
>14:58:05.21 3 SMTP-48452(thc.com) failed to resolve 'thc.com':Error
>Code=no DNS A-data returned

thc.com doesn't have any MX or A records.

>14:58:05.79 4 SMTP-48455(networkers.ch) failed to find relays: no DNS
>MX-data returned

networkers.ch has an A record, but no MX records.

-- 
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.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.