Some questions about bind

Pete Ehlke pde at ehlke.net
Tue May 4 17:28:25 UTC 2004


On Tue May 04, 2004 at 11:50:51 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
>
>You'll find the resolver making needless queries to the
>nameserver for names that CANNOT exist.
>
>Try running ethereal and do a query for an unqualified
>name.  Why on earth does Linux attempt to send the unqualified
>name to the nameservers??  It's like it's set to ndots=0.
>But it's not.  It's hard to figure out what it is doing???
>You can imagine the delays caused if one of the nameservers
>is down.
>

Define "names that cannot exist".

Because of things like this:

ucan[~]$ host museum
museum has address 195.7.77.17
ucan[~]$

it's pretty hard to tell what can and cannot exist. There are TLDs that
have A or MX records, as you see here, and there are installations in
private networks that use private root servers, in which the concept of
'names that cannot exist' becomes pretty slippery.

-Pete


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