Enterprise Bind 9.4.2 Caching nameserver

Bind is the de-facto DNS server used in almost all kinds of environment all over the world.
This article is a How-To for creating a local caching name server for your network to resolve DNS hostnames faster and also to conserve your precious bandwidth.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the crucial glue that keeps computer networks in harmony by converting human-friendly hostnames to the numerical IP addresses computers require to communicate with each other. DNS is one of the largest and most important distributed databases the world depends on by serving billions of DNS requests daily for public IP addresses. Most public DNS servers today are run by larger ISPs and commercial companies but private DNS servers can also be useful for private home networks.

Without DNS, most of the Internet comprising WWW, Email, etc will simply fail to work!
This How-To can to be used for running bind as a fast caching name server from a small network to a large corporate environment.

A caching only name server will find the answer to name queries and remember the answer the next time you need it. You can configure a caching name server to query the ROOT servers directly or use it to forward to your ISP name servers to build a very big and effective cache.

This will shorten the waiting time the next time significantly, especially if you’re on a slow connection.

Having said that, this guide can be used for both Linux based and BSD based operating systems.

Enterprise FreeBSD/Linux Squid Proxy Server

Squid is the most popular high end web proxy used by both by small or big organizations and ISPs around the world. It improves web browsing performance and conserves bandwidth. It also has a very rich Access Control Lists (ACLs) which can be configured to act as superb filter and can also act as a firewall.

The Squid project, currently, is now being run entirely by volunteers. It has a small but very talented and professional group of developers. I request everybody using Squid to help this great project in their own respective ways. You can either participate directly in it’s development, or be a tester of it’s latest releases or you can simply submit articles.

Or best of all, if you have the resources, please donate to this great and wonderful project. Whatever you donate, no matter how much, will go towards it’s development and R&D which will benefit everybody and the internet community at large.

Please check the following URL for more details:

http://www.squid-cache.org/Intro/helping.dyn

This installation manual is for Squid-2.6.STABLE18 which is the latest as of today (23-Jan-2008). This How-To can be used either on Linux based Operating systems such as Debian and BSD based operating systems such as FreeBSD. For Solaris users, replace “make” with “gmake” and make sure that “/usr/sfw/bin” is in your PATH.

This guide below details the steps for creating a powerful Squid proxy server capable of serving thousands of users per second. Please refer to the graphs towards the end of this article for actual details.