LinuxQuestions.org - Trouble with LAN nameserver...

Hello!

This is my first post, so feel free to laugh at me wile I'm still new and dumb :P .

My problem is that my local nameserver sometimes fail to respond to lookups in the local name zone. I've set up a number of domain names on my local network under the TLD .lan to avoid using ip's when accessing the machines. When it's been a while (more than one hour) since the last time I requested a .lan domain the first lookup always fails. This is usually when I try to send an email and the email client fails to connect to server.lan. Subsequent lookups work fine, but due to the DNS cache, server.lan will not be accessible until the cache expires.

I have the following network setup: I have three computers (one server and two clients) connected to an integrated router/switch/access-point (the gateway). The gateway has ip 192.168.1.1 and the server has 192.168.1.200. The gateway provides DHCP for the network and assigns permanently allocated addresses to all recognized clients based on MAC address. The gateway also provides DNS forwarding which means that all clients have 192.168.1.1 as their DNS server. The gateway is in turn set up to forward DNS requests to 192.168.1.200.

The server runs Slackware and Bind 9.3.1 with the following zone files:

lan.zone:
;
; lan zone file
;

$TTL 1D
$ORIGIN lan.

@ IN SOA dns.lan. root (
2006120801 ; serial
6H ; refresh
1H ; retry
1W ; expire
1D ) ; mimimum TTL

IN NS dns.lan.

gateway IN A 192.168.1.1
johanna IN A 192.168.1.10
zara IN A 192.168.1.20
server IN A 192.168.1.200

dns CNAME server

www.server CNAME server
www.gateway CNAME gateway

lan.revp:
;
; Revp for lan
;

$TTL 1D

@ IN SOA lan. root.lan. (
2006051903 ; Serial
8H ; Refresh
4H ; Retry
1W ; Expire
1D ) ; TTL Minimum

IN NS lan.

1 IN PTR gateway.lan.
10 IN PTR johanna.lan.
20 IN PTR zara.lan.
200 IN PTR server.lan.

It is worth noting that I never had problems with lookups on other TLD's than .lan...

Anyone got any clue???

Thankful for any help,

Yours Sincerely,

Soren