Forwarding: The decision, whether to employ it, is *complex*, kids.

Kevin Darcy kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Mon Dec 13 19:45:54 UTC 2004


Kevin D. Goodknecht Sr. [MVP] wrote:

> It is true that one should never say, unequivocally, that one should or
>
>should not, use a forwarder.
>A forwarder can show benefit to some users that have only a dial-up or ISDN
>connection, or where bandwidth use is critical. One has to remember that
>some ISP's still charge by the kilobyte, some will only give you access to
>their DNS servers, while most give you full access without limits.
>Sometimes, whether one uses a forwarder or not, is based merely on market
>forces.
>
Of course, forwarding can actually use *more* bandwidth if the 
forwarders are overloaded/slow/unreliable (thus causing frequent retries 
from the client). This seems to be fairly common, unfortunately, because 
forwarding doesn't scale very well and ISP's frequently fail to 
provision adequately for the query traffic they end up having to deal with.

I agree that one should not have an ironclad "forward" or "don't 
forward" rule. However, I think "don't forward" is a reasonable default 
(assuming one has a choice at all) unless one has specific reason to 
think that forwarding will derive some technical or economic benefit.

                                                                         
            - Kevin




More information about the bind-users mailing list