Setting up a local recursive resolver

Since all attempts to access a website require that you look up the hostname, the responsiveness of your nameserver can have a large impact on the loading of a webpage. A slow nameserver can delay the initial loading of the webpage as well as the loading of the various embedded images, video, and JavaScript, which might have been pulled third-party sites.

In this section, we'll be looking at setting up our own recursive nameserver, which will help cut down on the round trips between you and your resolver. We will additionally configure it to forward uncached queries to a public recursive nameserver in order to take advantage of their caching.

How to do it…

Let's set up the local recursive resolver:

1. Install bind9 on Ubuntu; this can be done with sudo apt-get install bind9. On Red Hat and CentOS, it can be done with yum install bind instead. For other distributions, consult the relevant documentation.

2. Add an allow-recursion entry in the options section of the...