2nd Follow Up - Re: My Introduction and current issues

[bind9 at clearviz.biz]

All - Here is a general follow up and status report on my activities in 
configuring Bind9 and getting it to work.

1)   Recursion - I commented out all the elements of recursion in 
named.conf.options. At the same time, I also commented out the 
"forwarders" clause and "forward only". The result was a colossal 
failure. All kinds of errors in named.log and /var/log/syslog. Way more 
than I had been getting before. I reverted back to the old 
named.conf.options file and it returned to the previous level of errors.

2)  IPv6 - Further inspection of the logs yielded a large number of 
"connection refused" and "SERVFAIL" errors when attempting to listen 
on/contact the IPv6 interface. So I commented that out. Not using IPv6 
at present. That seemed to have reduced the error log content quite a 
bit.

3)  "Listen on" Clause - Previously, I had been listening on port 53 at 
both my machine's hard IP but also the localhost IP (127.0.0.1).  I saw 
in the log that named was only listening on 127.0.0.1#953 for the NIC 
interface.  I didn't know if that might be a factor, so i removed the 
localhost address from the "listen on" clause and left only the 
machine's hard IP.  While /var/log/syslog still indicates that it 
started up and is listening on 127.0.0.1, I do see a great fewer errors, 
and I do see connections/queries that show not localhost, but the 
machine's IP.

4)  WAP - The above reduction in errors allowed me to examine the log to 
where I could trace the errors associated with the use of my smartphone 
(in Wifi mode) on the WAP. I was able to grep named.log on my 
smartphone's DHCP assigned IP, and all of them were "Query Failed  on 
timeout."  Virtually no more "Connection Refused" errors. I am gathering 
that other devices needing DNS resolutions on the WAP are also failing 
similarly. I will analyze accordingly.

          Question:  What is setting the "timeout" value in re: these 
queries, and can I  tweak it for a bit more time? Is there a BIND9 or 
config file setting for that?

5)  Local DNS Cache - I do see that Firefox (in Win7) is caching some 
DNS responses locally in its memory. This may be why I see better 
performance in some URLs. But there also appears to be better 
performance in URLs not being cached locally in Firefox. I gather those 
are being cached in Bind9. This may also explain why a good portion of 
URLs in my Chrome equivalent are not performing as well as in Firefox 
(no local browser caching).

I'll keep analyzing the logs. I have Wireshark installed now on my WIn7 
machine and can import tcpdumps from the Ubuntu Server for analysis.  At 
this point, I'm comfortable with the BIND9 install and config, so I 
thank all of you for your help. I'm sure, though, I'll be back with 
specific questions, if any arise.

Thanks all!
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