In my experience, using an upstream server is faster and more reliable than having a DNS server on a home network recursively solve the name. That said, MaraDN

In my experience, using an upstream server is faster and more reliable than having a DNS server on a home network recursively solve the name. That said, MaraDNS/Deadwood does have full recursion support, which resolves correctly over 99.9% of domains, but there is that .1% or less of misconfigured domains which only resolve when a recursive DNS server is bug-for-bug identical to BIND. NSD/Unbound are good DNS servers, as is the newer Knot DNS suite. djbdns was really good in the early 2000s, but hasn’t been updated since 2001 and its age is starting to show. Yes, there are third party patches, but forks of the djbdns codebase have this annoying way of getting abandoned after a couple of years. I’ll probably end up doing basic maintenance of a djbdns fork just so there’s something getting minimal maintenance available to download.