Preloading the cache

[Kevin Darcy]

Martija, Ricardo wrote:

>Hi,
> 
>
>I am new to DNS and BIND. I went through the FAQs but could not find
>information on how to preload the cache with information. Can someone
>tell me?
>
>BTW, I am using BIND 9.
>
Well, it depends on what you mean "the cache". Some people still use 
that to refer to the "hints" information. With BIND 9, you can define a 
zone of type "hint", and the information in the zone file will be used 
for contacting the root servers to ask about root-zone information (once 
the real information from the root servers is seen and remembered, then 
the hints information is not used any more until the nameserver is 
restarted).

Hints information is, however, restricted to only the root zone, and 
only the root NS records and their associated A records. You can't just 
put arbitrary information in the hints file.

If by "the cache" you mean the temporary storage of DNS data, as an 
optimization so that named doesn't have to keep fetching the same data 
over and over from authoritative nameservers, referrers and/or 
forwarders, BIND does not provide any facility for putting arbitrary 
information into "the cache". All of the information that gets in there 
does so from answers to queries that named has previously made.

                                                                         
                                                                     - Kevin