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<p>All - Here is a general follow up and status report on my activities in configuring Bind9 and getting it to work.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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. </p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p> 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? </p>
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<p>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).</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>Thanks all!</p>
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