Re: [squid-users] dns.

You can increase the name caching that Squid performs, which is more
efficient than requesting of an external caching server (and certainly
more efficient than running caching nameservers on every box, which is
quite a poor use of resources--Squid doesn't like to share).

Look at ip_cache and fqdn_cache directives (I think ip_cache is probably
what you'll want to increase).

Other than that, if you're getting a lot of DNS errors, then you need to
look at fixing your DNS servers. That kind of error should be very
rare, even from very modest DNS hardware and extremely loaded Squid
boxes (name service is much easier than the job Squid has to do). I
reckon your upstream DNS provider isn't doing their job.

So, in short, it isn't a Squid problem, and most people don't even think
about DNS service--it isn't a difficult problem as long as DNS is being
resolved correctly on your network. What I'm getting at is that it is
unlikely that most folks here are going to any extreme lengths (as you
are doing) to provide name service to their caches--most are probably
just running two local nameservers, a primary and secondary, and not
thinking much more about it.

orko wrote:
> Hey,
>
> Just curious what peoples opinions are on whether to put local named's
> on each cache, or put aside a separate box to do dns caching for all the
> caches? (assuming we're talking about 3 or 4 busy caches). The reason I
> ask is we're currently doing the latter, and I'm noticing a lot of
> idnsCheckQueue: ID blah: giving up after 21 tries and 303.3 seconds
> appearing. The resolv.conf's all point to the dns cache first, with some
> other boxes as backups, so squid has about 4 nameservers it loads at
> startup (none are the box itself though).

-- 
Joe Cooper <joe@swelltech.com>
http://www.swelltech.com
Web Caching Appliances and Support