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5t34lth_G33k

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DNS question from DNS Noob

I currently have a SBS 2003 server with DNS serving our internal domain and forwarding unknown domain requests to our ISP's servers. This is OK until our ISP's servers go down or have problems (yes, it has happened!). What I would like to do is implement caching on our server so that even if our ISP's DNS servers go down, we can at least have some DNS functionality (albeit out of date until the ISP DNS server comes back online)

How do I go about doing this? What are the risks?
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oBdA

If your ISP is unreliable, you can just remove the forwarders completely; the DNS server will then query the root DNS servers.
Hello,

oBda has the right answer here. You do not have to turn on caching - it is there by default.  If you look at the SOA record for a DNS zone - it tells the DNS servers how long the dns information should be cached, etc.

So there are no steps to "implement caching" - just use the DNS server built into Windows 2003 server.

If you use DNS Admin Console, turn on the advanced viewm then you should be able to see the cached data.

Some or many of the cached zones may only show NS record "name server" records, that simply means that only the name server records are still cached, any hosts or A record had expired.  

Mark
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ASKER

So how is it then that when our ISP's DNS servers go down, we get page cannot be displayed errors? Surely if caching is on be default, our DNS server should look to its cache when its forwarders are unavailable?
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markpalinux
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