Understanding or configuration problem?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <c75vs3$1646$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 "Peters, Michael D." <Michael.Peters at acbl.net> wrote:

> I have a public BIND server running with version 9.2.3 on Solaris. From the
> outside, I can get the correct information about those hosts I have existing
> records for. Now if I request information about an external host, then I get
> a whole string of useless information. I presume this is a configuration
> issue at my end. I am interested in knowing why it behaves this way.

It looks like you have recursion disabled on the server, i.e. you have 
"recursion no;" in the options section of named.conf.

> As a public DNS server that only should be concerned with my public hosts,
> is this a bad thing? My concern is that it might interfere with SMTP or
> something else that relies on DNS.

If this server is only supposed to be used as the authoritative server 
for your domains, it's a good configuration.  But if you also use it as 
the caching server for clients or servers on your network, you need to 
enable recursion.  You can use the "allow-recursion" option to restrict 
who can use it this way.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***