[TriLUG] Name server

[Kevin Otte]

I'm with Matt P on this one. You're not really going to gain much. That
said, gathering the statistics might make for interesting research.

BIND allows you to dump the contents of the cache:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=903651

or if using the PowerDNS recursor:
rec_control dump-cache <output_file>

>From there you could noodle around what's common in the cache and
perhaps keep it there.

You may also be able to leverage PowerDNS' Lua scripting (postresolve
hook?) to keep track of these stats in realtime.

Good luck!

-- Kevin

On 02/22/2014 07:39 PM, Igor Partola wrote:
> Coding practice is one reason. I can use this as an opportunity to learn more about the innards of DNS.
> 
> Practically, I run bind9 on my home server so I already get most of the benefits, except that because of the particulars of my network and the crappiness of my ISP a request can take either 40ms or 1200ms to resolve: a noticeable amount of time on any given web page. Seeing as most of the domains I visit have a TTL on the order of hours I could easily speed up the perceived speed of web browsing at my house by making sure that most DNS request are resolved from a local cache. The goal here is not to just have a caching server, but to actually never let it expire by making a request before it does.
> 
> An alternative approach I considered was to scan bind's logs and just make frequent request based on that, say once an hour. However, then I would not learn much and the approach would not be nearly as foolproof.
> 
> Igor
> 
>> On Feb 22, 2014, at 6:44 PM, Jonathan Mainguy <jon at jmainguy.com> wrote:
>>
>> In all seriousness. What is the benefit of doing this? Other then coding
>> practice.