Advice for personal dns server

[AbbieNormal]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:42:50 -0400, David Botham
<DBotham at OptimusSolutions.com> wrote:

>bind-users-bounce at isc.org wrote on 10/20/2004 06:20:03 PM:
>> I want to set up a personal dns server to use on my local network. My
>> only goal is faster lookups. I hope to achieve this by eliminating the
>> latency of dns requests going onto the internet to my ISP's dns
>> servers. I also want to add reliability, since my ISP's servers are
>
>Even if you run your own name server, your queries are going to go out on 
>the internet eventually, so don't be looking for improvements here.
>
>> kind of flakey sometimes. This server will be sitting behind a Linksys
>> router doing NAT/PPPOE, which is hooked up to a 
>> 768/128kbps dsl link.
>
>If the ISP's name servers are not reliable, then you will benefit from 
>running your own name server.

I just did some testing by installing bind 9.3 on my winxp pro system.
Looking at the packet captures,  I was kind of disappointed to see all
these small ttl's, like google.com's 5 minutes, for instance. And the
trend will probably be towards even smaller ttl's in the future, so
caching won't do anything for me. Plus, the hosts' OS (winxp) does
caching of its own. 

Even with all these iterative lookups it was doing, bind was only
slighly slower than using my isp's servers, and in some cases it was
slighly faster when the isp server suffered the occasional hiccup (the
primary isp server was actually down for a little while during my
testing, and my hosts reverted to using to using the secondary isp
server).

So it looks like I'll be using the Sun for backup purposes only. My
hosts will use the Linksys router as their primary dns server, with
the Sun being their secondary. The linksys will always have the
current 2 isp server addresses thanks to pppoe, and it actually does a
little bit of caching itself. So, lookups should be quite snappy when
the cache gets hit, and mostly fast when it doesn't and the linksys
needs to use one of the 2 isp servers to complete the request. When
the 2 isp servers are dead, the Sun will take over.

I have one configuration question. My named.conf consists of only the
following:

options 
	{
 directory "C:/WINDOWS/system32/dns/etc/";
	 };


How did bind know what the ip's of the root servers are? Don't you
need some sort of root hints file for that that you have to do
occasional manual maintenance on? Does version 9.3 change this? Are
the ip's hardcoded somewhere in the source code maybe? How does this
actually work?


Thanks.