In large, well organized, academic or ISP (Internet Service
Provider) networks you will sometimes find that the network people has
set up a forwarder hierarchy of DNS servers which helps lighten the
internal network load and on the outside servers as well. It's not
easy to know if you're inside such a network or not. It is however
not important and by using the DNS server of your network provider as
a ``forwarder'' you can make the responses to queries faster and less
of a load on your network. If you use a modem this can be quite a
win. For the sake of this example we assume that your network
provider has two name servers they want you to use, with IP numbers
10.0.0.1
and 10.1.0.1
. Then, in your named.conf
file,
inside the opening section called ``options'' insert these lines:
forward first; forwarders { 10.0.0.1; 10.1.0.1; };
Restart your nameserver and test it with nslookup. Should work fine.