[Gllug] Name server software?

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 01:47:33PM +0000, Doug Winter wrote:
> Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> >I was under the impression that BIND was what people used for the same 
> >reasons they still use Sendmail: they it know and it is well-tested and 
> >working (cf, "Legacy" thread also on GLLUG right now).  Are the newer 
> >DNS implementation truly not worth considering?  Have they not improved 
> >on anything?
> 
> Nah - BIND 9 is decent.  Don't touch BIND 8 or BIND 4 with a very long 
> pole, but 9 is a complete rewrite and they've done a good job.

BIND9's pretty horrible, but IME it's the best there is.

Amongst its warty features:

* Pretty horrible configuration syntax (don't forget those all-important
  trailing '.' or ';' !)

* The way it silently starts up even if some of the config files are missing.

* The way it silently _fails_ to start up if some of the config files are
  syntactically incorrect.

I consider myself to be something of an expert with DNS and BIND,
managing dozens of domains now, and having managed literally thousands
of domains in the past, and yet just before going on holiday this
Christmas I still went and broke all of Merjis's A and MX records by
accident.

Much of the problem comes from DNS itself which is a curious
distributed database with crufty syntax, complex rules and caching all
over the place which disguises real problems.  The O'Reilly book (DNS
and BIND) explains a lot of stuff that you need to know.

Rich.

-- 
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug