Re: Working with a local DNS cache

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-09-23 at 11:54 -0700, Adam Langley wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> > Colin and I discussed this last week too; is the Chromium cache a
> > machine-global cache (ie, running other programs would also route
> > requests through the cache), or does Chromium want the DNS data in
> > parallel with the normal glibc resolver?  Seems like it is a global
> > cache, right?
> 
> Sorry, I think the word 'Chromium' is confusing here (which is
> probably my fault since I introduced it). Chromium is just another
> process which uses DNS (although it's a pretty heavy user due to
> prefetching[1]). There's a DNS cache inside of Chromium itself, but
> it's very short lived (on the order of a few seconds) and exists only
> to merge DNS lookups when we simultaneously open multiple connections
> to the same host. This cache is per browser process.
> 
> The DNS cache which implements the DBus interface[2] is a real DNS
> cache and is designed to be machine global. (It's a hacked up version
> of djbdns[3]). It exists only because I'm sure that some distros would
> balk at including BIND by default and I wanted another answer if/when
> I try to get them to enable local DNS caching by default. The DBus
> interface name includes 'chromium' only because I didn't have a better
> name at the time. It's nothing to do with the Chromium codebase.

Is that something you intend to ship and support going forward, ie a
tool that distros should start including alongside dnsmasq and the like?

Dan