DNS resolver problems in old version of Unix

[Cricket Liu]

> On our two servers we are running named and have two independent
> ethernets going into each server.  Thus we have four possible targets
> for our resolver.
> 
> Basically there are two problems.
> (1) I know of no way to change the initial timeout period for the
> resolver.  Currently it is 6 seconds and I want to reduce that to one
> second.  How can I do that?

With very new resolvers (8.2+), there's an option to do that:

option timeout:N

> (2) The books, and the man pages, say that when multiple nameservers
> are listed in resolv.conf that the processing is at the first timeout
> setting for the first nameserver, then the second nameserver, etc.  It
> then wraps and tries the first nameserver with double the timeout, then
> then second, etc.  However, the observed performance (I killed the
> first nameserver named and did a "nslookup -d machine_name" showed that
> the order is the first nameserver, then at double the timeout, then
> double that, then double that and then the second nameserver, etc.  
> How can I fix this to the proper behavior?

You can read the chapter on nslookup, which will explain
the (very common) mistake you're making.

cricket

Acme Byte & Wire
cricket at acmebw.com
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