BIND, dial-up, Solaris gotcha

David Cooke dave at konig.demon.co.uk
Sat Mar 18 19:55:11 UTC 2000


I posted a week or so ago asking how to properly configure BIND so
as not to keep checking against other name servers when the machine
is on a dial up link.  Every hour or so it would seem that BIND
would attempt to refresh the cache from my ISPs name servers.

I've now discovered the source of this problem - its not BIND at
all, but a Solaris demon called nscd.  The default configuration
of this demon is set to cause hostnames passed to gethostbyname()
to be re-checked every hour.

Its configuration file is /etc/nscd.conf.  Removing the comment
character from the line that reads:

	#        enable-cache            hosts           no

and restarting the demon:

	root: /etc/init.d/nscd stop
	root: /etc/init.d/nscd start

should stop this behaviour.  The again, for a home machine on a dial
up, a passwd and group cache probably isn't the most useful thing to
have - you may just want to leave it disabled.

	root: mv nscd.conf nscd.conf.off

Hope this is of some help to someone.

	David Cooke.




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