BIND Cache - Authoritative

Here is the situation:
We have several DNS servers authoritativly hosting about 80,000 domains. Would like to test using a BIND based caching server in front of the core DNS servers to decrease the load on the SQL (backend of the core dns servers)

Problem being that BIND will give non-authoritative answers to queries. I have set it to forward to only our core DNS servers, then cache the record for the time of the ttl.

Is there a way in this case to force BIND to answer authoritatively to all queries? (short of hacking the source) I am testing with BIND 9.6

Thanks!

Same problem. Any suggestion?

I did not discover a way to accomplish exactly what I wanted to do. Due to the production and mission critical nature of our DNS services I did not want to fiddle with the source. For now I have tweaked the cache settings as much as possible on the core servers and setup extra monitoring around DNS performance.

What you need are more DNS servers and a load balancing scheme. There's more than one way to accomplish this in practice. You can setup a cluster or you can have lots of slaves and put load balancers(s) between them and your internet connection(s). If your serious about this, checkout F5 Networks Big-IP product line. This is not an endorsement of that product. I am sure there are others out there, but working for a particularly large software giant in Redmond WA over the past five years, I fielded more support questions regarding Big-IP than any other load balancing product. Seems to indicate its prevalence.

Oh, I forget the ubiquitous delegation scheme. You can have your top level DNS servers delegate to other servers. This reduces the search space your top level DNS severs have to deal with and pushes some of the work off to other servers. Your top level servers would only handle domain delegation and other servers provide the answers. You just have to work out a scheme for which delegates handle which domains. Traffic to your top level servers is reduced as DNS caches store the delegation responses for specific domains.

Sorry, I can't help you with the Bind cfg specifics at this time. I just don't use Bind often enough and when I do, it's mostly trivial configurations.

Actually I do use a BigIP unit for clustering of everything including the DNS servers, what I was really trying to accomplish is relieve some of the SQL traffic the DNS servers generate due to the sheer amount of queries. Things are working alright for now, but will probably end up revisiting this at some point in the future.