I have a rather large home network, which is used by the family. A performance issue appears to be that with everyone's activity, there are lots of DNS hits. The local ISP is slow, but there are some other alternatives like OpenDNS, which may perform faster.

What I would really like to try is to cache dns calls locally. For lots of reasons, all the machines here have static IPs, so using the DNS caching capability of dnsmasq is apparently not an option.

Can anyone point out what options I might have? I'd like to cache a small number of DNS calls, (~1000 to 5000), and have DNS run through my gateway slackware 12.1 box. That box would make outside queries for addresses not in the cache, or for which the cache was getting stale on.

Any pointers? Thanks.

Well, I am not familiar with dnsmasq too much but I can't see what way static IPs flows on the DNS caching capability of dnsmasq.

dnsmasq provides for dns cacheing of dhcp clients. Since my IPs are static, DHCP is not used for any of them, and therefore the dnsmasq dns cacheing capability cannot be used.

If I had dynamic IPs, allocated by dhcp, then the question would be moot, since I could use dnsmasq.

Does anyone have a suggested solution?

Could you point the part of the dnsmasq manual which states that it serve DNS resolution ONLY for hosts with IPs got from DHCP ?

This is incorrect - you may give out static IP's through static DHCP and Dnsmasq is set up to do this if you wish. Simply build a table in dnsmasq mapping ip's to mac addresses and then those IP's will always be given out to the same clients.

I had my network setup this way as it eased setting up gateway and nameserver addresses across the network.

This is defined in the DHCP RFC 2131 here and is known as manual allocation. It forms part of the standard.

You may use dnsmasq in your case in fact it's ideally suited and will cut configuration and administration as well as speeding up DNS access.

It doesn't ! Dnsmasq handles DHCP, DNS forwarding and caching. It's DHCP may be static or even disabled and it's DNS caching may handle all requests should you so desire.

Have you considered djbdns?

How about Pdnsd? Low memory footprint, cache surviving reboots, highly configurable.

You are right! I fired up dnsmasq, and low and behold, it started serving dns. I'm not clear on how much it cached, because the times on repeated dns requests does not drop much. I can investigate further.

Thanks.