Re: Telnet/Winblows. Benefits of DNS etc.

[Martin P Holland <nospam [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Fri, 03 Mar 2000, Matthew John Palmer wrote:

>>  Whilst on the subject, what benefits would I see if I ran a caching
>> nameserver? I`ve got a P75 with 24Mb that I could use...I started to set
>> one up, but gave up - couldn`t be arsed.
>
>You'd see a bit of a speedup in lookups for frequently used sites, but the
>caching in most resolver implementations isn't bad, usually.  I personally
>wouldn't bother setting up a caching name server, it's not really worth the
>hassle.  The benefit comes when you have a few machines, and maintaining
>hosts files is getting to be a mondo pain in the arse.  Add those benefits
>to the bit you might get from a caching nameserver, and you start to get
>into the benefits region of the graph...

I'm using a cacheing-only DNS nameserver here (with just one machine). The big
advantage for me is that it makes it easy to switch between different ISPs. The
point being that if you plonk some new nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf then
applications using the resolv library in libc to do lookups (i.e. pretty
much everything) will happily carry on using the old contents of
/etc/resolv.conf. So if you want to vary your nameservers the only way to do it
without possibly having to restart apps at connect time is to have 127.0.0.1
in /etc/resolv.conf and run your own nameserver.

atb
Martin

-- 
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~pm1mph



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