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Cache Only or Zone DNS?

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3 replies

by yuemo

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Currently we use Wins for name resoluation, and have a outside DNS available for use for outside name resolution. W2k is not on the table.

My questions are these:

1. If we put a DNS inside LAN (no outside access), will the traffic on the WAN (T1) be increased or decreased, compared to the current configuration? I am concerning those traffic related recursive queries.

2. If we do put a DNS inside, better to associate some zone information or just to store cache? Since the Wins will be still used (we have 95, 98, 4.x), only a few server names will be added into the zone file.

Thanks!

3 replies

by cavedweller

I would setup a local machine as a "forwarder". Setup the rest of the machines to use the forwarder for DNS. The forwarder will cache DNS information and try to answer queries from it. When it needs to it will query your outside DNS and return the answer to the local requester (and store the data in its cache for reuse).

You can either "seed" the cache with local info or run a local zone.

The effect on WAN traffic depends on a couple of factors. If your a lot of your users tend to access the same sites then most of the DNS queries will be answered from cache and traffic will be reduced. If users rarely access common sites then your traffic will remain about the same.

If you really want to cut down on traffic install a proxy server on the forwarder. This will cache the contents of sites. In addition to significantly reducing your WAN traffic, web pages retrieved from cache load a lot faster. This is subject to the traffic pattern variations described in the previous paragraph.

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