DNS forwarding: does it actually work?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <c3atct$1s7p$1 at sf1.isc.org>, tikvah7 at yahoo.com (Robert) 
wrote:

> I am trying to get Bind 9.2.1 to FIRST forward incoming DNS requests
> to our primary NameServer before looking it up in it's own
> configuration. Is this possible? I thought it was supposed to work
> something like this, but it does not forward requests first...it looks
> them up directly anyway.

No, it will never forward requests if the server is authoritative for 
the zone.

"forward first" means that it tries the forwarders before querying the 
authoritative servers for the zone; "forward only" means that if the 
forwarders don't have the answer it just gives up.

> under global options I have:
> 
> options {
>         directory "/var/named";
>         pid-file "/var/run/named/named.pid";
>         transfers-in 500;
>         transfer-format many-answers;
>         forward first;
>         forwarders {
>                 69.56.134.34;
>                 };
>         };

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***