bind forward to rbldns server intermittently fails

[Ramprasad]

On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 09:28 -0500, David Nolan wrote:
> 
> --On Friday, November 17, 2006 15:26:31 +0530 Ramprasad <ram at netcore.co.in> 
> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> >  forward first;
> <snip>
> > Everything seems to work perfectly fine .. but sometimes all of sudden
> > the named server seems to have failed When I "dig" for a listed ip I get
> > a negative response. I restart bind and then for the same ip I get
> > positive response
> >
> 
> I believe you want 'forward only' not 'forward first'.  'forward first' 
> means "if forwarded query fails, perform normal recursion", 'forward only' 
> means "never recurse, if the forwarded query fails return failure"
> 
> I've seen the same behavior from a similar setup here.  What happens is 
> that at some point BIND gets a timeout from rbldns, and falls back to 
> performing normal recursion, which gets a negative response from some 
> server, and that response is then subject to standard negative caching.  So 
> the next query bumps into the negative entry in the cache and is aborted 
> without being forwarded to your rbldns server.

I think that was it. 
So "forward only" would do the trick. But why would rbldns timeout over
a local 100MBps network. Can I do something to stop that 
The rbldns server by itself is never loaded 

Thanks
Ram