DNS problems this morning -

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 01:29:31 +1030,
   Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>It may well work fine, if all you ever ask the name servers to do is
>resolve outside internet addresses.  But, if you have a LAN that
>communicates with things within the LAN, by name, then *all* name
>queries need to be answered by your LAN DNS server, as no external DNS
>server can answer any queries about your internal LAN addresses, and
>there's no way for you to say resolve this name from here, and the rest
>from anywhere.  Your only solution to that conundrum is putting LAN
>addresses in the hosts file, because that will be queried before asking
>a DNS server.  Which rapidly becomes a nuisance on largish, or expanding
>networks.  And doesn't work on networks with dynamically changing
>addresses.

You can use tinydns and dnscache to work around this. I think there are 
also ways to do it with bind, but I don't use it and can't say for sure.

dnscache allows you to specify that certain domains (the local LAN domain 
in this case) are handled by dns servers at specific IP addresses rather 
than starting at the root for discovery. You can use tinydns to provide 
DNS information for your local domain name. Machines on your LAN just need 
to point to the dnscache server(s) to resolve both public and local domain 
information.