¿Allow or Disallow recursive lookups?

[ilustrate]

i´m trying to make sure that i´m offering my clients the best in shared hosting and want to assure that my dns reports are optimized and free of warnings.


the following was received from a DNSstuff DNS timing A report. .... .........



Took off 2 points since ns1.mysite.com allows recursive lookups (if lots of people are using the server, it can slow down).
Took off 2 points since ns2.mysite.com allows recursive lookups (if lots of people are using the server, it can slow down).
........ ...........


I noticed other top quality sites do not have this. How could I improve or repair this rating?

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Here are a few of the things which they will use to 'score' your domain:
(these are just some of the points, there are others)
(suggestions are in bold)

Took off 3 points for ".net" TLD (extra lookups may be required to find the parent servers).

Took off 3 points for ".org" TLD (extra lookups may be required to find the parent servers).
If you have anything other than plain .com sites, you are going to lose points no matter what.
Personally I think this is a dumb scoring item.

Took off 8 points for having no glue at a parent server [adds 2 extra packets to lookup].
Make sure you have 'glue', if your IPs are still delegated to your ISP, then they will be the ones who have
to make the changes. If you have delegation of the rDNS for the IPs, then make sure your xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa
files are setup correctly.

Took off 2 points since ns1.yourdomain.com allows recursive lookups (if lots of people are using the server, it can slow down).
I have not found a way on a Plesk box (yet) to actually prevent recursion, eventhough I have it set to 'no' in the named.conf file...
[Edit: I got confused, my Plesk boxes are set for 'recursion no' in the named.conf and they show properly on the report, I had one nameserver where it was set to yes, but I thought that was a Plesk box (it's not).]

Took off 3 points for having a CNAME (ns1.yourdomain.com is really yourdomain.com., which could potentially cause extra lookups).
Be careful how you use CNAME records. Some people say they should NEVER be used, but personally I don't see the harm in using them
for certain things (not just any reason).

Took off 20 points since ns.yourdomain.com does not respond authoritatively (can cause unexpected responses and add delays).
Make sure all of your primary nameservers respond authoritatively for the domains being hosted on that server

Took off 4 points for >80ms average response time.
Took off 20 points for >200ms average response time.
They have different levels of points depending on how long the avg response time is, to avoid this, make sure your average
response time is as short as possible.

There are probably tons more possible scoring issues, but no matter what, they are pretty clear as to why they are deducting
points, and so if you *really* want this particular report to be as clean as possible, you will have to address each item
for each of the hosted domains. There will be some things which you cannot change, such as deducting points because the
domain is not a '.com' [really silly and IMO stupid]

 

[ilustrate]

editing named.conf

thanks james. i'm glad you had time to enlighten us on these other issues as well. Do you mind telling us where we can find the path to named.conf file? Is this file a file that is edited via SSH? i would like to set my plesk recursive to no as well. What exactly is recursive lookups? Is it actually better to have this set to No?

 

[phoenixisp]

You can edit the file in /etc/named.conf.