Make DNS try harder?

[Paul Tomblin]

I run a local nameserver so that I can reach the other machines on my
network by name.  After upgrading to FC3 from RedHat 9, I'm finding
frequent cases where a DNS lookup fails, but doing it again
immediately works.  This has two major consequences:
- email going out from my mailing lists works intermittently for some people
- the "wget --spider" I run every hour to check that my web site
hosted on another system frequently reports that the other system is
down, even though another check immediately afterwards works.  My web
host support people think that's because the TTL is quite low on their
systems, and once the entry has expired from the cache it might take
too long to fetch the new one.

Is there a way to make my nameserver try twice or wait longer for a
response?  Or is this likely a problem with my ISP's name servers
which I have listed as "forwarders"?



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