turn off the cache

[James Raftery]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2000 at 12:41:42PM -0400, Kevin Darcy wrote:
> > How can I set up bind v.8 to disable my name server's caching?
> 
> You can't. And you almost certainly wouldn't want to. The most you can
> do is increase the interval at which named cleans expired entries out of
> the cache.

Actually, I reckon you can do it and I'm doing it right now because in
my situation I definitely want to.

Firstly, to the BIND developers, a feature request:
 - An option to disable all caching.
 - If that's not do-able, an option to specify the IP addresses of 
   recipients of NOTIFY messages for each zone that will be used as the
   *only* recipients of NOTIFYs. The key being, the recipients are
   supplied as IP addresses and therefore are not looked-up by a
   sysquery.

Because there is no way to stop BIND caching records, the alternative is
to make sure it never resolves for anything. If it doesn't look it up,
it can't cache it.

Stop all incoming sources of cacheable information:

options {
	recursion no;
	fetch-glue no;
	notify no;
};

The drawback is losing the usefulness of NOTIFY messages. So I use 
some Perl/Net::DNS to craft up NOTIFY messages and send them to the
zone's slaves.

[ The problem I'm solving in my situation is that BIND is cacheing and
announcing the results of its sysquery's for slave nameservers when
it sends them NOTIFYs. I only want BIND announcing information I have
explicitly supplied in a zone file. The machine is a TLD nameserver - I
don't want it announcing anything it's picked-up from the general
internet. ]

I would be very grateful for comments on what I'm doing. Is there
anything obvious I've missed ?

Regards,

james
-- 
James Raftery (JBR54)  -  Programmer Hostmaster  -  IE TLD Hostmaster
   IE Domain Registry  -  www.domainregistry.ie  -  (+353 1) 706 2375
  "Managing 4000 customer domains with BIND has been a lot like
   herding cats." - Mike Batchelor, on dns at list.cr.yp.to.