DNS questions

[agar]

I'm kinda confused about DNS. So a dns server has a list of host names associated with ips? Also what does a caching name server due?

[cloverm]

Also what does a caching name server due?

Makes changing servers for your website extremely painful. ;D

[korn]

A caching name server reads all the DNS information (ips and host names) and puts it into RAM and so it doesn't have to lookup things on a slow hard drive to resolve names.

[Killer_Penguin]

A caching name server reads all the DNS information (ips and host names) and puts it into RAM and so it doesn't have to lookup things on a slow hard drive to resolve names.

Close,

The true defination of a caching DNS server is one that handles requests only. You request an IP for a hostname. Since it's caching only, it isn't the authority for anything, it forwards that request on to other DNS servers, who may know the awnser. Once it gets an awnser, it stores that awnser in a database for future use. It's a timed entry, that will expire after a certian amount of time. Most often this is in ram, as mentioned above, but it can also page out to a database file, if memory becomes an issue.

Using caching DNS servers on a local network can save bandwidth and speed up browsing, becuase you won't have to send your requests across a WAN link, just your local lan link. Same with corp's who are seperated by slow WAN links.

If you can, you should setup a caching DNS server, if nothing else it will give you an idea of what is involved with a real DNS server, and you will get some extra speed (;