Topic: Do I need to run the e-smith DNS Server

[Nick Texidor]

Hi,

I'm running an e-smith 5.1.2 box as my Internet Server/Gateway.  I only have access to a 56k dial up connection to my ISP, and I run my mail server in house.

I have just received my latest ISP bill, and the cost has doubled previous bills, even though I am not doing any more browsing/downloading than normal.  I installed ntop to try and work out whether e-smith 5.02 was doing anything that version 4 wasn't.

There appears to be a lot of DNS traffic, and while it's still fairly small amounts of data, I wondered whether it needed to be running at all?  Is it required by the network, for example, by the smtp server, or for the network to browse web sites?  I was under the impression that dns was something that was provided by my ISP?

Can anyone please shed some light?   If I can remove it, how did I disable it from running and starting up next time the machine is restarted.

Thanks

N

[John Crisp]

I'm not a DNS guru, but here's my 2 cents worth.

It should be better to have DNS running on the server, generally speaking, with all the client machines set to point to the server for DNS queries rather than your ISP.

The server should then weed out local enquiries over non local. Otherwise your client machine will be asking the ISP every time a client wants the name of another machine on your local network - not good.

I believe one of the most common DNS lookups is 'workgoup' - true or not it indicates the problem.

If you have Windows machines, then these are frequently the cause of indiscriminate lookups - check your logs to see where the queries originate and what they are looking for. It's all to do with NETBIOS lookups etc - not my forte to explain it all though.

I do believe that e-smith servers do have something of a penchant for lookups too - have a hunt through the forums as there are several posts on it.

Do you run DHCP for the clients or static addressing ? I found that this helped me keep the lookups down a lot when I changed.

Let me know if I can help further.

B. Rgds
John

[Graeme Fleming]

If you can do without the netbios name lookup on the local network then disable the checkbox on the MS TCPIP protocol that allow netbios name lookups over TCPIP.