[nsd-users] NSD + unbound on production nameserver (not internal nameserver)

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Hi,

For the past week I've been unsuccessfully trying to replicate on a FreeBSD nameserver our old BIND configuration, replacing it with with NSD + unbound instead.

Apparently, this is not possible, since it looks like unbound doesn't work as an 'proxy/cache' front-end. But... let me tell you about our configuration first.

This is a pair of FreeBSD servers, running several jails. Each server runs a jail with a real, public IP address on a nameserver for external (not internal) nameservices. Several other jails, each with a private address space, run the customers' websites. So we host both DNS name service as well as hosting services on behalf of our customers.

With BIND, the configuration was as following:

- Be authoratitative for external requests. Deny recursion for those.
- Act as a caching nameserver for internal requests (from the many jails). Allow recursion only for them.
- Internal requests for the domains we're authoritative for would also go to BIND as well, since, from BIND's perspective, it matters little where the request comes from (e.g. public/private addressing is irrelevant for authoritative requests)

Now for unbound + NSD.

When I first started to read about unbound + NSD, I thought it would be simple — like a Varnish/Apache configuration. NSD would remain on a non-accessible port (say 53530) on the nameserver jail, while unbound would forward requests to it. For internal requests from the other jails, unbound would act as a recursive caching server — easy to setup. To avoid unnecessary requests to external nameservers when requesting information from domain names we are authoritative for, unbound would simply forward requests to NSD. Easy-peasy. That works quite well for *internal* requests. Now the final and crucial step: how to allow the general public to retrieve domain information that we're authoritative for by contacting unbound?

Apparently, this is impossible to do.

Jan-Piet asked this same question in 2008: http://unbound.net/pipermail/unbound-users/2008-February/000021.html
And Oliver Peter did the same, five years later: https://unbound.net/pipermail/unbound-users/2013-November/003075.html

None ever received a single answer.

Indeed, by carefully reading the principles behind the unbound + NSD configuration, it seems that it has been designed to deal only with the scenario of a corporate network that requires both some DNS caching (provided by unbound) and a few internal, private domains being served by NSD, which, however, are never accessible by the public at large.

In contrast, on its own, NSD can be (and definitely is) used as an authorative nameserver for publicly available domain records — but without the added 'protection' of having unbound in front of it. Thus, although it *seems* that unbound + NSD is *similar* to Varnish + Apache for the web, in fact it's a *different* solution.

If I'm completely wrong about this, then how can unbound + NSD be configured so that unbound is able to act as a 'proxy/caching' nameserver as a frontend to NSD for public domains for which it is authoritative?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

	- Gwyn


--
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country."
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