[buug] Resolving host

[Michael Paoli]

Quoting Ian Zimmerman <itz at buug.org>:
 
> Joseph> I'm finding that in using my browsers, I have to resolve hosts
> Joseph> far too often, sometimes on every access to a given host, even
> Joseph> within moments of the last one. I should be caching this
> Joseph> somehow, and probably have to set one thing somewhere, but
> Joseph> forget what. Clues?

> Joseph> I'm running Mandrake 10.0 Official, mostly using the Mozilla
> Joseph> Firefox 0.8 browser.

> I don't know about any setting in Mozilla that causes it to cache DNS
> information internally, but I haven't looked too hard.

> I always run a local caching name server.  It doesn't have to be BIND.
> I have been very happy with dnsmasq for at least a year.

If you do some type of caching only or caching mostly nameserver,
you get the DNS caching benefits for at least the entire host in most
regards.  This will often show significant performance enhancements,
particularly where slow link(s) are involved and many of the resolver
requests are repetitive.  Relevant placement of caching only/mostly
nameservers can also significantly reduce DNS requests that are
external or traverse slow, expensive or congested links.

If one doesn't have or can't find handy enough references on caching
only/mostly nameserver configuration, one can always pick apart a
Debian .deb package easily enough.  If one doesn't typically deal with
*.deb files - they're in ar(1) format ... and within that some files are
tar(1)ed and gzip(1)ed.  The Debian stuff seems to mostly use caching
only/mostly configurations by default, so looking over how Debian
does some of the basic configuration stuff could be useful.

references/excerpts:
resolver(5)
nsswitch.conf(5)
named(8)
http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=bind9&searchon=names&version=all&release=all