...on Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 09:38:43AM -0400, Will H. Backman wrote: > > For the other part, if you're running your own nameserver, > > why would you want to use forwarders at all? > The use of forwarders is a good thing. It reduces the load on the root > servers, and your DNS server gets to use closer servers that may already > have the answer.
I might have said something similar 10 years ago, but hey, it's 2005 now... The root servers are least affected, because they will be cached first. The TLD servers will get a little more traffic, but hey - they're paid to handle that. The single domains probably won't notice at all, as it doesn't fundamentally change their usage pattern. It's not as if we're talking about a scarce resource here, so the overall effect is probably pretty negligible. Also, if you're using a forwarder outside of your control, you have to trust it's cache contents, which increasingly tends not to be a good thing (apart from cache poisoning attacks, just as an example, there are attempts to force German ISPs to block access to certain domains by altering the data returned by their customer resolvers). Today, the only valid reason to use a forwarder is if you're not allowed to do direct DNS queries. Alex.
