All - Here is a general follow up and status report on my activities in
configuring Bind9 and getting it to work.
1) Recursion - I commented out all the elements of recursion in
named.conf.options. At the same time, I also commented out the
"forwarders" clause and "forward only". The result was a colossal
failure. All kinds of errors in named.log and /var/log/syslog. Way more
than I had been getting before. I reverted back to the old
named.conf.options file and it returned to the previous level of errors.
2) IPv6 - Further inspection of the logs yielded a large number of
"connection refused" and "SERVFAIL" errors when attempting to listen
on/contact the IPv6 interface. So I commented that out. Not using IPv6
at present. That seemed to have reduced the error log content quite a
bit.
3) "Listen on" Clause - Previously, I had been listening on port 53 at
both my machine's hard IP but also the localhost IP (127.0.0.1). I saw
in the log that named was only listening on 127.0.0.1#953 for the NIC
interface. I didn't know if that might be a factor, so i removed the
localhost address from the "listen on" clause and left only the
machine's hard IP. While /var/log/syslog still indicates that it
started up and is listening on 127.0.0.1, I do see a great fewer errors,
and I do see connections/queries that show not localhost, but the
machine's IP.
4) WAP - The above reduction in errors allowed me to examine the log to
where I could trace the errors associated with the use of my smartphone
(in Wifi mode) on the WAP. I was able to grep named.log on my
smartphone's DHCP assigned IP, and all of them were "Query Failed on
timeout." Virtually no more "Connection Refused" errors. I am gathering
that other devices needing DNS resolutions on the WAP are also failing
similarly. I will analyze accordingly.
Question: What is setting the "timeout" value in re: these
queries, and can I tweak it for a bit more time? Is there a BIND9 or
config file setting for that?
5) Local DNS Cache - I do see that Firefox (in Win7) is caching some
DNS responses locally in its memory. This may be why I see better
performance in some URLs. But there also appears to be better
performance in URLs not being cached locally in Firefox. I gather those
are being cached in Bind9. This may also explain why a good portion of
URLs in my Chrome equivalent are not performing as well as in Firefox
(no local browser caching).
I'll keep analyzing the logs. I have Wireshark installed now on my WIn7
machine and can import tcpdumps from the Ubuntu Server for analysis. At
this point, I'm comfortable with the BIND9 install and config, so I
thank all of you for your help. I'm sure, though, I'll be back with
specific questions, if any arise.
Thanks all!
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