Forwarding

Forwarding configuration instructs resolver to forward cache-miss queries from clients to manually specified DNS resolvers (upstream servers). In other words the forwarding mode does exact opposite of the default recursive mode because resolver in recursive mode automatically selects which servers to ask.

Main use-cases are:

  • Building a tree structure of DNS resolvers to improve performance (by improving cache hit rate).

  • Accessing domains which are not available using recursion (e.g. if internal company servers return different answers than public ones).

  • Forwarding through a central DNS traffic filter.

Forwarding implementation in Knot Resolver has following properties:

  • Answers from upstream servers are cached.

  • Answers from upstream servers are locally DNSSEC-validated, unless policy.STUB() is used.

  • Resolver automatically selects which IP address from given set of IP addresses will be used (based on performance characteristics).

  • Forwarding can use either unencrypted DNS protocol, or Forwarding over TLS protocol (DNS-over-TLS).

Warning

We strongly discourage use of “fake top-level domains” like corp. because these made-up domains are indistinguishable from an attack, so DNSSEC validation will prevent such domains from working. If you really need a variant of forwarding which does not DNSSEC-validate received data please see chapter Replacing part of the DNS tree. In long-term it is better to migrate data into a legitimate, properly delegated domains which do not suffer from these security problems.

Simple examples for unencrypted forwarding:

-- forward all traffic to specified IP addresses (selected automatically)
policy.add(policy.all(policy.FORWARD({'2001:db8::1', '192.0.2.1'})))

-- forward only queries for names under domain example.com to a single IP address
policy.add(policy.suffix(policy.FORWARD('192.0.2.1'), {todname('example.com.')}))

To configure encrypted version please see chapter Forwarding over TLS protocol (DNS-over-TLS).

Forwarding is documented in depth together with rest of Query policies.