Book Image

DNS in Action

By : CP Books a.s.
Book Image

DNS in Action

By: CP Books a.s.

Overview of this book

The Domain Name System is one of the foundations of the internet. It is the system that allows the translation of human-readable domain names into machines-readable IP addresses and the reverse translation of IP addresses into domain names. This book describes the basic DNS protocol and its extensions; DNS delegation and registration, including for reverse domains; using DNS servers in networks that are not connected to the internet; and using DNS servers on firewall machines. Many detailed examples are used throughout the book to show perform various configuration and administration tasks.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
DNS in Action
Credits
About the Authors
Preface
Country Codes and RIRs
Index

3.4 Negative Caching (DNS NCACHE)


Keeping negative replies to DNS requests is defined by RFC 1034 and RFC 2308.

Negative caching means that into the name server cache is entered information that authoritative name server bear out that the requested RR record not existing in DNS.

Resolvers used in the past did not generate the same negative answers to the same request. In order for us to use negative replies correctly, we need to exactly define the content of a negative reply and the time for which it should be kept in cache.

RFC 1034 defines negative caching as optional. Some BIND implementations like BIND version 4.9.2 support negative caching. RFC 2308 defines negative caching as an obligatory feature of the resolver and defines the content of a negative reply.

Windows 2000 uses negative caching. The time is kept implicitly at 5 minutes. If we want to change this time period, we have to adjust the NegativeCacheTime key (of the REG_DWORD type) in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet...