[Server-devel] DNS strangeness on 0.5.2

[Sameer Verma]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Martin
Langhoff<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>> Any ideas on what's broken? Where should I begin to look?
>
> BIND on the XS is trying to perform DNS lookups against the root
> servers. That'll work from your home connection, but may be blocked in
> the uni network. When the XS gets the DHCP lease, it probably also
> gets the IP addresses of the local network servers, and then
> dutifully... ignores them :-/
>
> The solution is to set a 'forwarders' entry in /etc/named/named-xs.conf
>
> Ideally, we should rig our dhcp client with a hook that reads the
> nameservers provided by the server, update named-xs.conf,  restart
> named. Wad mentioned once that Debian has a package with such a
> script.
>
> Does that help?
>
> cheers,
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>

So, I tried this out on xs-0.6d yum updated with enablerepo=olpcxs-testing

Added forwarders to /etc/named-xs.conf like such

options {

...
...
forwarders { 130.212.10.163; 130.212.10.162;};
forward only;
 };

and it works like a charm!

130.212.10.163 and 130.212.10.162 are our campus DNS servers.

Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/