DNS Server for a Local Domain
 

I am interested in finding out some details on setting up DNS server for a local domain, here is the setup and here is what I am trying to accomplish:

1- Win2003 Domain with DNS servers in the data center
2- Remote sites connecting via VPN
3- Not all PC's are part of the domain so at times they have issues resolving host names.
4- Plus to much DNS traffic and I'd like to eliminate the DNS traffic as much as I can and keep it local to each site.
5- Now I can't put a windows 2003 server in every single location, what I'd like to do is use a low end PC with a Linux Distro on it acting as a DNS server for the local clients and I want this DNS server to sync with our main DNS servers for the local domain queries and forward the rest to eternal DNS servers that I configure on our firewall.

Cheers

I don't have much experience with Windows server domains, so that complicates things just a bit for me. But, I think to do what you need you would want to setup a DNS cache at each of your remote sites with clients at each remote site connecting to their local DNS cache for DNS queries.

You would need to configure your DNS cache to use your DNS servers for local domain queries (local Windows domains?) and use the external ISP DNS servers for all other domains.

Here's a DNS cache server program that I believe might be useful for what you are trying to accomplish: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/dnscache.html

DNS Cache
 

Thanks John that will actually work, I can't seem to find the link to download the program though...

If I'm not mistaken, I believe dnscache is part of the djbdns group of programs. Here's the main page for djbdns with various info links: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html and the install page is at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/install.html