Strange results with local BIND caching name-server
 

Here's a strange one!
I set-up a simple home nameserver on a Fedora 9 machine. BIND has two forwarders set-up so it can passed requests out. It works really well now, but I noted a strange behavior.

When using the DNS I set-up I couldn't keep a log-in on some of the forums. I could log-in using my username and password but I would get logged out automatically a page or two later (this included LinuxQuestions). This didn't happen if I used the external name servers directly and bypassed my home system.

I installed BIND as an experiment in order to learn how to use it, but this was becoming frustrating.

I eventually fixed the problem. In my named.conf I had set the "forward first" directive within the "OPTIONS" statement. So esentially, my caching name server was a bit pointless. I commented this line out and now everything seems to work fine.

My question is why. Does anyone know why I was getting this behavior when my local server was set to forward first?

Thanks!

I was wrong
 

Okay, I thought it was working. Seems that there is obviously something else wrong.
Does anyone know where else I could have gone wrong?

Thanks again!

You don't need to setup forwarders for a caching name server. All you have to do is to use the hint "." zone and use a fresh copy of the root.hints zone file. Read this for more details.
To get a fresh root.hints file, run