Hosts/dns contention in FBSD 5.4

[Malcolm Kay]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 02:21 am, J. T. Farmer wrote:
> Malcolm Kay wrote:
> >On Wed, 5 Oct 2005 11:06 am, Jeremy Bogan wrote:
> >>You could try running a caching DNS server locally, DjbDNS
> >> is simple to setup and get going.
> >
> >Yes, I have thought that maybe a local simple caching dns
> >server would help; and if I can't otherwise fix the problem
> >I'll give it a go. And I appreciate your suggestion of
> >DjbDNS.
> >
> >It does seem however that this should not be necessary.
>
> It is necessary when you have multiple machines and you take
> away the connection to their DNS.
>
> So, you have a couple of choices.  the first is to setup each
> machine such that it refers to it's local files first, then

If you can find my original query you will see that I have /etc/
host.conf and /etc/nsswitch set to go first to the local files,
and the appropriate entries are in /etc/hosts; and that is why I 
felt a local DNS server should be unnecessary -- but it doesn't 
seem to work out.

It seems that later releases of open_sshd by default do a reverse
DNS lookup. See  Robert Marella's response.

Even if the "UseDNS no" option works it looks like the local 
caching server might be the way to go.
 

> looks for the remote DNS or you setup a local caching server. 
> Personally, I would go for the second choice. A local server
> can be responsible for DNS for all local machines (including
> itself) as well as referring & caching external lookups.  this
> makes life a lot simpler for configuring the other computers.
>
> John
>

Thanks,
Malcolm