hello there,
my company runs a service where we track equipment in the field, and send a text message to the customer if the status of that equipment changes.
we use exim and postfix to do this. we also use apache and rails to allow them to see this on the internet.

the problem is when our isp sometimes goes weird on their dns servers and the pages we are trying to send out take a long time ( i think to resolve )

i was wondering if we ran bind, we could have those email address providers on our own system and speed things up a bit. I know that lots of big web services use their own dns server to make their own system more readily available on the net, but will it help us with resolving outside our own domain too? I am looking for a better dns than what we have with our ISP.

btw, we are in a small town, we don't have the option of switching ISPs

thanks for any advice for a newbie to this.

go to isc.org and read the manual

thanks for the link.

You might want to measure look-up times to get a good idea of where you are now. Additionally, there may be some mileage in pinging your ISPs nameservers from time to time to get some idea of whether their servers are overloaded.

One possible way forward is to tell your ISP how good (or otherwise) their nameserver performance is, and see if they then have any interest in upgrading the performance. They may well not know how bad their performance is and they may take a responsible attitude to that. You aren't about to change ISP, but they may have other customers who are, and if this is their major performance problem, it would be a relatively cheap thing for them to cure.

That is all out of your hands, however, and you may well prefer to be doing something that is in your control. (Or, to progress both approaches in parallel.)

I am going to advise you to consider using something other than BIND. BIND is pretty much a "Swiss Army Knife" product, with loads of options and is very flexible, but there are two costs to this. It has a history of more bugs/exploits against it than is altogether comfortable, although it is presumably rather better now than it once was. More significantly I would guess, from your point of view, it can be a bit tricky to configure (on the other hand, there is a choice of books dedicated to BIND, and the fact that there needs to be kind of tells its own story...).

I guess that you would be better off looking at something like dnsmasq or maradns (or even djbdns) which are smaller, lighter-weight, easier-to-configure alternatives. On the other hand, if you really want the flexibility of a system that allows you to have control of the behaviour of both internal and external look-ups and a structured hierarchy of resolving machines, get yourself a BIND book.

Have a look at your distro's package manager to see whether any of the alternatives are available 'pre-packaged' for your distro, and don't commit to BIND being the one without a little thought.

You might want to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...erver_software for an overview of the DNS options and maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dns_server for more general DNS information.

thanks a lot for this,
i am going with an alternative to bind. It has had me bound for hours now trying to get it right.
i only really want the caching aspects of it anyway.

thanks again

If you only want caching then I could suggest Pdnsd. It caches to disk on -HUP so unlike BIND you won't lose your cache. It's maintained and supported, you can define sets of DNS servers to query in parallel (add OpenDSN?), define any external files for static lookups, add negative lookups (ad servers) and much, much more.