forwarders are unreachable -> lookup fails?

Roel van Meer rolek at alt001.com
Wed Mar 21 15:13:47 UTC 2001


Hello all,

I am running bind 8.2.3-REL on RedHat 6.2 with the latest updates. It is
a caching-only setup.
I am using two forwarders to pass queries to, with forward first, and
this all works fine.

The problem arises when the servers i have in the forwarders list are
unreachable, or do not have bind running. As i understood from the
manpage:
"      A value of first, the default, causes the server to query the
forwarders
       first, and if that doesn't answer the question the server will
then
       look for the answer itself."
But when both my forwarders do not exist, the query fails with:
"*** localhost can't find www.nasa.gov: No response from server"


First question: Is this behaviour as expected?
I would not know where to look if there are any errors in my
configuration, and maybe i misinterpreted the documentation, but i'm not
sure about this. Maybe one of you is?
Does named have any settings on what to do if a host fails or is
unreachable? Maybe that could fix it.


Second question (if relevant): Is it desirable? Apparently "answer the
question" means 
"is not authorative for, or doesn't have in cache". Should it be
considered a bug?


Regards,

rolek

---/ named.conf /---
options {
        directory "/var/named";
#       forward first;
#       forwarders {
#               10.1.0.15 ;
#       };
};

zone "." {
        type hint;
        file "named.ca";
};
zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" {
        type master;
        file "named.local";
};
---//---
---/ named.local /---
$TTL 14400
@       IN      SOA     localhost. root.localhost.  (
                                      1997022700 ; Serial
                                      28800      ; Refresh
                                      14400      ; Retry
                                      3600000    ; Expire
                                      86400 )    ; Minimum
              IN      NS      localhost.

1       IN      PTR     localhost.
---/---

--
1A First Alternative rolek at alt001.com    www.alt001.com
Linvision BV         rolek at linvision.com (www|devel).linvision.com
--


More information about the bind-users mailing list