enable DNS

[Jeff Vian]

Kenneth Porter wrote:

> --On Friday, June 11, 2004 2:55 PM -0400 David Collantes 
> <david at bus.ucf.edu> wrote:
>
>> You do not need to run DNS to do what you are trying to do, but you need
>> to list a valid (or more than one) DNS on your /etc/resolv.conf, which
>> should contain:
>>
>> search dnsdomainname.com
>> nameserver XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
>> nameserver XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
>>
>> Of course, XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX are the IP of the DNS you are going to use.
>> Done!
>
>
> But it's nice to run your own caching server to reduce traffic and you 
> eliminate dependence on your ISP's servers. To do this, install the 
> caching-nameserver RPM package. It's a config file for BIND (named) 
> that runs it only as a caching server. Then enable and start the named 
> service.
>
> Finally, in /etc/resolv.conf, set the nameserver to 127.0.0.1 so that 
> it will consult your new caching nameserver.
>
No you don't,   Your caching nameserver still needs to query some other 
server for lookups and setting that as the only nameserver in 
resolv.conf will break dns for you.

The advantage to this approach is if you have several machines on your 
lan and you use a single caching nameserver, then your other hosts can 
query your caching nameserver host and aggregate calls to the remote 
servers while taking advantage of the caching service.

For a single host it has no benefit, and in fact will slow down lookups.

>
>