Short-Term Memory

It is always annoying when I need to use Internet via a satellite route. The latency is really bad. To counteract this, I use caching wherever I can. My choice of cache for DNS requests is Pdnsd [1]. More or less any fat distribution will have the lean and fast daemon in its collection. When launched, the daemon parses the content of /etc/hosts and stores it in its cache. Any DNS requests that I make are added.

By default, the cache is 2MB. If you have built a very long /etc/hosts throughout your IT landscape, you can modify the cache size in /etc/pdnsd.conf. The matching option resides in the global section. It goes by the name of perm_cache and expects the size in bytes – I use 8192. By the way, the option is named perm_cache because the cache not only resides in RAM but also on the disk. In other words, Pdnsd does not need to build the cache from scratch after a reboot.

In the global configuration section, you will find other central settings. One setting that is very important is:

server_ip = 127.0.0.1;

What this means is that Pdnsd only responds to DNS requests that come from localhost. If you want to allow other machines on the same network to submit IP requests to Pdnsd, you need to replace 127.0.0.1 with the interface that points to your internal network:

server_ip = eth1;

Options min_ttl and max_ttl let you define the minimum and maximum amounts of time the cache will keep an entry. The defaults – 15 minutes and one week – make a lot of sense in my opinion, and I tend to leave them that way. This is not true of the timeout parameter, which is typically 10 seconds; this is not enough if you make generous use of a satellite route. I tend to double this value to timeout = 20s;.

Say It!

After setting up a new Pdnsd, I like to make it more chatty by setting verbose = 3;. (In difficult cases, I maximize the verbosity by setting debug = on.) Once everything has reached a steady state, I comment out this option, and Pdnsd silently goes about its work.

Another option that I find useful is status_ctl = on. It allows me to send commands to Pdnsd on the fly using the pdnsd-ctl tool. Figure 1 shows the command

sudo pdnsd-ctl status

in action. Right at the top, you can see the cache utilization level, followed by an overview of the active threads and global configuration options. The sudo pdnsd-ctl empty-cache command lets you empty the cache, which can be necessary after DNS changes if you do not want to wait until the TTL expires. You can type sudo pdnsd-ctl help for an overview of the other commands.

Figure 1: The start of the output from sudo pdnsd-ctl status.

Although Pdnsd is unable to cure latency in satellite connections, it can at least alleviate the pain – and that is a good thing.