DNS newbie question

[iceman80231 at yahoo.com]

Chris wrote:
> <iceman80231 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:d5qruk$nck$1 at sf1.isc.org...
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I have two DNS servers external to my firewall, running BIND 9.2.2.
> > Any hostnames that they cannot resolve are being forwarded to my
ISP's
> > DNS servers.  My servers have zone data files and I wanted to see
if
> > caching was enabled and, if not, to configure BIND so that it is
> > enabled.  After endless searching on Google, I have heard very bad
> > things about nscd and BIND not working well together so I want to
> > reconfigure BIND to continue to resolve hostnames with its own zone
> > data files, forward requests it cannot handle to the ISP's DNS
servers,
> > AND cache the latter results to cut down on requests made to the
ISP's
> > DNS servers.  Many thanks.
> >
> >
>
> Why use forwarders at all. You have a fully capable DNS server so
don't send
> recursive queries to your ISP's servers. Let yours do the leg work.
>
> Chris.

Chris, thanks for the advice.  At the same time, at least for my
knowledge, I am very curious about the following:

a)The earlier respondent said that BIND caches by default.  How do we
know this, i.e. is there a configuration setting/switch in which this
feature is turned on/off?  If so, what is it and in what file is it
stored?

b)Is there a way to see the cache data?  How is it stored, e.g. is it
written to a file whose contents are wiped based upon the TTL specified
on the DNS server in question or is it memory-resident and wiped out
after a systemm reboot?

Thanks.