What kind of hardware?

[Bill Larson]

> Anyone have any good suggestions as to what is most important when 
> setting up a caching-only DNS using BIND 8 or 9? It will be used by a 
> few mailservers etc. Should I focus on much memory? I suppose I won't 
> need extreme amounts of diskspace? A fast processor will always help, 
> right?

RAM is the single most important issue for a name server.  But for a
caching only server, this shouldn't be too much of a concern either.
All cached DNS information stays in RAM, so the more the better -
but don't go crazy with it either.

Disk space is not important, assuming that you have enough to hold
your OS.  If you build BIND somewhere else and then simply copy the
executables, BIND is quite small.

CPU speed is not critical.  BIND-8 and BIND-9 appear to require more
CPU than the old BIND-4 which ran quite will on slow '486 systems.
But this shouldn't be too significant.

I would suggest a mid-level Intel/AMD system running OpenBSD or
FreeBSD.  I'd equip this box with 128MB RAM and a smallish (1GB) disk,
and a good PCI 10/100 ethernet card.  Absolutely nothing special.  Look
for reliability rather than speed.  These systems are cheap, and
reasonably reliable.

> Also - are there any things I should keep in mind when setting up a 
> chroot'ed BIND running as non-root user under Solaris 2.6 or newer? Any 
> tweaks etc. that I should do right away?

Definitely get a cpy of Cricket's "DNS & BIND", do this "right away".
Also, take a look at
<http://www.cymru.com/~robt/Docs/Articles/secure-bind-template.html>
which addresses running named in a chroot/non-root environment.

Bill Larson