enable DNS

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Saturday, June 12, 2004 6:50 AM -0500 Jeff Vian <jvian10 at charter.net> 
wrote:

> The advantage to this approach is if you have several machines on your
> lan and you use a single caching nameserver, then your other hosts can
> query your caching nameserver host and aggregate calls to the remote
> servers while taking advantage of the caching service.

On a network with restricted access to the Internet, this makes sense, as 
you reduce the use of the scare resource, your small pipe. For a machine 
with a broadband or better connection, you would suffer the cost of the 
extra hop going through a forwarder if there's a cache miss, which makes 
performance highly dependent on the characteristics of your forwarder's 
cache. It also makes you vulnerable to misconfiguration of the forwarder. 
(Ask Comcast/ATTBI customers about that when it happened a couple years ago 
for a couple months and screwed up Win2k users. Win2k's client caching 
resolver locks to the first server returning a reply, and it would randomly 
lock to ATTBI servers with bad information.) A root hints system removes 
your forwarders as points of failure. You bypass them and go straight to 
the authoritative servers for each domain.