Forwarders

[Kevin Darcy]

No, specifying multiple forwarders is only for failover, not to get a
"second opinion" if the first forwarder doesn't happen to know the name.
In fact, later versions of BIND render the configured order of the
forwarders meaningless -- "named" will pick the *fastest* forwarder --
which underscores the point that multiple forwarders are for
performance/redundancy/resiliency, not for "cascading" namespaces.

If it weren't for the NetID aspect, I'd suggest that you set up your
nameserver with per-domain forwarding, or as a slave or a stub, for the
particular domain in question, which would override the
"global" forwarding you have in your options statement. But I haven't had
much luck with this kind of fine-grained zone configuration with NetID in
our evaluations so far -- I don't even know if it's possible within the
NetID framework. Maybe you could set up a non-NetID BIND server as a sort
of "relay" and have all the NetID servers globally forward to it (??)


- Kevin

asburyk at erols.com wrote:

> I am attempting to make our NETID DNS servers forward to two external
> name servers, but it appears that a request for an external host stops
> after the first forwarder can't find it in it's database. Shouldn't
> the request be passed to the second forwarder which I know has the
> information? The forward directive looks like this:
>
> options
> {forward only;
>  forwarders
>  {1.2.3.4;5.6.7.8;};
> check-names master ignore; };