Can someone explain forwarders and why I don't need them?

[Herb Martin]

> So would I best best leaving my main server without a forwarder? Does
> this mean that everytime it needs a lookup it's going of half-way across
> the internet to get an answer? Or should I use a forwarder and point
> them to my ISP's DNS servers? Or is there another way of achieving this
one?

Generally if you need a forwarder, you need all of your DNS
servers to use the forwarder -- otherwise clients of the server
that doesn't won't be able to resolve those external names.

Generally your forwarder should be "close" -- at your gateway
to the Internet or main office, at your ISP, etc.

The idea is to have only one machine make the requests that
cross the WAN line to consolidate the cache -- or having a
machine at the ISP (with perhaps a big cache from other
ISP customer request's) do the recursion all over the public
namespace since it probably has more bandwidth.