When we moved to a new apartment, I took my FreeBSD DNS server with us. We couldn’t get internet set up until today (about a month! – it was a nightmare) but I was using the DNS to ease our little network’s file and printer sharing. Even though we only have a few computers, it’s better to be able to refer to them by name. It took us about a month to get an internet connection, but I expected that once I configured the wireless router everything else should “just work” as it did before.
Well it almost worked out that way… seems I forgot to change the forwarders in my named.conf to reflect my new ISP’s DNS server. My local DNS server handles internal DNS requests for us and it also acts as a caching server to help speed things up. Without valid forwarders configured, each lookup for a URL that wasn’t already in the cache seemed to take forever! In fact, some lookups failed, and when I checked with nslookup, I would get “no servers can be found”. After looking around the net for a while, I decided to check named.conf one more time… and yeah… still had my old ISP’s DNS server listed in the forwarders section…