Re: Non-existent zone file

easiest workaround:

=dummy.a.record.mil:127.0.0.1:260000

this efficiently gets the load completely off your back for three days 
per querier.

i've seen this phenomenon numerous times, mr. cabezon's observation 
notwithstanding. remote sites and clients will pound your nameserver 
with queries when you've been delegated authority but don't have any 
records. tinydns may 'drop' the requests, but that doesn't stop those 
queries from pushing up the load on the nameserver significantly.

On 12/3/2009 10:24 AM, Rich Rumble wrote:
> We were inundated with request for a domain we didn't have in the cdb,
> and the NS's became very sluggish, but bandwidth wasn't too high... so
> perhaps tinydns was dropping the requests, but the process was clearly
> the highest in use in top for that period. We sniffed the requests and
> saw 99% were looking for a name we didn't have, a whois indicated that
> someone pointed the domain at our NS's. Perhaps it was just ironic
> timing... we figured we'd create a zone and point it to maintenance
> page, once we did the load went way down and so to did the
> connections, were still trying to get a better understanding of what
> happened, were not certain our actions of creating the file and
> make'ing the cdb were the actual fix or if it just subsided at that
> same time.
> -rich
>
>
>
>    

-- 
Paul Theodoropoulos