[Pdns-users] built in recursor: what ip to set recursor=?

[Jeff]

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hi bert and friends-

i'm just getting started with pdns- so far it looks great! i'm looking forward
to replacing bind and djbdns with it. 

i'm running the pdns-static-2.9.15-1 rpm on a redhat 9 box. i see that the
recursor was originally a separate binary, but it is now built in. however
after reading the docs and mailing list archives i'm still unclear what i
should set recursor= to?

i want pdns to use its internal recursor, talking to the root servers if it
doesn't have a cached answer. however it seems that if i set recursor=<my ISP's
nameserver> (can i specify more than one?), all recursive queries will go to
this host instead of directly to the root servers. while i'm all for decreasing
the load on the root servers, this configuration seems to create a dependancy
on my isp's nameserver which i don't want - what happens if the host specified
in 'recursor=' is unreachable? recursor=localhost didn't do what i wanted
either.

i should mention that at the moment i'm attempting to use pdns in a slightly
unusual way- i have no master or slave zones configured (in fact, no named.conf
at all). i figured i'd first make sure it could resolve recursive lookup
requests from localhost. my pdns.conf is quite short:

[root at ns root]# egrep -v '^#|^$' /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf
launch=bind
local-address=XX.YY.4.53
recursor=206.13.31.12
setgid=pdns
setuid=pdns

perhaps unrelatedly, things did not behave as i expected until i set the
'local-address=' variable - i have two IPs, one on an aliased interface
(eth0:0). both IPs are in the same netblock. lastest stock RH9 kernel. is this
a known issue?

thanks,

jeff