Countdown in NSLOOKUP

[oscarh]

Hello:

Keep in mind during the following that this is my first exposure to named, so
I may ask some unnecessary questions.  I have RTFMPs.

I have a DG/UX box that's the primary nameserver for our domain (call it
local.com).  We have no problems resolving names/hosts in our domain.

We are also part of a larger intranet (call it big.com) - we even use the
intranet's nameservers for the root domain, and have entered the nameserver
info in root.cache thusly:

.                          99999999    IN   NS         server.big.com.
server.big.com.     99999999    IN   A           123.456.789.10

When we start named (4.9.3) on the DG/UX system, we have no problems
resolving names in big.com.  When we do an nslookup, however, we can see the
TTL for anything in big.com counting down from 24 hrs, until eventually the
TTL expires.  When the TTL has expired, we can no longer ping or connect to
any machine in big.com by hostname.  Once we restart named, however, we can
connect to big.com again for 24 hours.

If I do an nslookup on addresses within local.com, the TTL is displayed as
86400 (1 day), and never decrements.  The only addresses that decrement from
24 hours are those in big.com

Now I'm confused - I thought we had the data in root.cache so that if any
hosts or domains expired, the cache data would be used as hints to tell my
server where to find the information it needed, either by hostname or by IP
address.  Apparently, however, the cache data is not kept forever, because
when the timeout occurs, we get "ns_req: no address for root server" messages
every time we try to access anything in big.com.

Can someone point me in the right direction to solve this?  Should I indicate
to my server that I am secondary for big.com?  When the timeout occurs, we
can ping IP addresses, but not host names.

If further info is needed, just let me know and I'll post it.  In the
meantime, TIA.

--
OK,

oscar


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