Delivery of non-cached replies

[Sam Trenholme]

> I had a particular problem with VMware Fusion and negative replies.

OK, I've thought about this more.  This issue isn't a bug with
Deadwood where we need to hack the source to fix things.  Deadwood
caches negative replies just fine.

The issue is that Deadwood will, by default, send "SERVER FAIL" DNS
packets when it's unable to contact an upstream DNS server.  Since
upstream DNS servers sometimes temporarily (on the order of one or two
minutes) don't reply to Deadwood requests, we need to tell Deadwood to
generate these SERVER FAIL replies.

To fix this, add the following line to your dwood2rc file:

handle_noreply = 0

Another solution is to try increasing the timeout, or the number of
times Deadwood tries contacting an upstream DNS server before giving
up.  For example:

timeout_seconds = 5
num_retries = 3

I think, at this point, you're barking up the wrong tree.  DNS
negative replies do have a SOA record in the NS section of the answer,
and Deadwood correctly caches and passes on these kinds of replies.

Then again, the issue could be something else.  Again, please let us
know exactly what the problem you experience is, and whether your
supplied patch resolves the issue.

- Sam

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