Why am I unable to turn off recursion in ISC BIND?

Question

Here's my named.conf.options file:

options {
        directory "/var/cache/bind";
        dnssec-enable yes;

        auth-nxdomain no;    # conform to RFC1035
        listen-on-v6 { any; };

        # disable recursion
        recursion no;
};

I've tried adding allow-recursion { "none"; } before recursion but this also has no effect; I'm testing it by using nslookup on Windows, and using google.com. as the query (and it returns an IP, so I assume recursion is on). This issue occurs on two servers with similar setups.

Answer 1

Just a quick one to rule out the obvious, do you have an:

include "/etc/bind/named.conf.options";

(or similar) somewhere in your /etc/bind/named.conf ?

Answer 2

If the domain is already in the cache, there is no need for bind to do recursion, which might be why it returns a result even though you have recursion off.

Restart bind (to flush the cache), then try a few queries to domains.

You might also have issues if you're using views and the IP you're querying from is in a different view.