[PLUG] nscd

[Paul Heinlein]

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:

> as i tediously await the end of a wget process that is taking 5 
> seconds to resolve the same hostname over and over again to finish 
> mirroring this slow, distant site, i consider putting the hostname 
> into /etc/hosts.
>
> and then i wonder whatever happened to nscd?

The first question I'd ask is, why is your local DNS resolver not 
caching the results. Most sites provide DNS TTLs of over an hour; the 
exceptions are fast-changing distributed sites like Google which 
provide TTLs of just a few minutes.

For most sites, however, your local nameserver should return the 
address for a frequently asked hostname in just 10s of milliseconds.

Who provides your DNS service?

> why is it no longer standard (on ubuntu at least) to have a name 
> service caching daemon?

I know that Fedora and Red Hat are migrating away from nscd to sssd, 
which (afaict) is intended strictly for authentication caching and 
doesn't support DNS caching.

> caching is generally awesome, and while i can find no evidence that 
> nscd was standard in ubuntu even as far back as release 6.06 (man, i 
> really need to make it back to texas to upgrade that machine! 
> shudder.),

Even on machines I manage that rely on nscd, I don't use it to cache 
DNS results. I'd rather setup a caching nameserver. Use aptitude to 
search for dnsmasq, a lightweight DSN forwarder.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/