BIND 9.10.0rc2 is now available

[Michael McNally]

Introduction

   BIND 9.10.0rc2 is the second release candidate of BIND 9.10.0,
   a new branch of BIND 9.

   This document summarizes features added or significantly changed
   since the previous major release. Bug fixes since the most recent
   development release (BIND 9.10.0rc1) are also summarized.

   Please see the CHANGES file in the source code release for a
   complete list of all changes.

Download

   The latest versions of BIND 9 software can always be found on
   our web site at http://www.isc.org/downloads/. There you will
   find additional information about each release, source code, and
   pre-compiled versions for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Support

   Professional support is provided by Internet Systems Consortium,
   Inc., doing business as DNSco.  Information about paid support
   options is available at http://www.dns-co.com/solutions/.  Free
   support is provided by our user community via a mailing list.
   Information on all public email lists is available at
   https://www.isc.org/community/mailing-list/.

Special Note

   After the release of BIND 9.10.0rc1, the BIND 9 development team
   was informed of a namespace collision with another open-source
   software product: the Xapian search engine already includes a
   tool called "delve".  Accordingly, we have altered the spelling
   of our "domain entity lookup and validation" tool, first introduced
   in 9.10.0b2, to "delv". Apologies to the Xapian project for the
   oversight, and to any early adopters of delv that may have been
   inconvenienced by the change.

New Features

   DNS Response-rate limiting (DNS RRL), which blunts the impact
   of reflection and amplification attacks, is always compiled in
   and no longer requires a compile-time option to enable it.

   An experimental "Source Identity Token" (SIT) EDNS option is now
   available.  Similar to DNS Cookies (as invented by Donald Eastlake
   III and described in draft-eastlake-dnsext-cookies-04), these
   are designed to enable clients to detect off-path spoofed
   responses, and to enable servers to detect spoofed-source queries.
   Servers can be configured to send smaller responses to clients
   that have not identified themselves using a SIT option, reducing
   the effectiveness of amplification attacks.  RRL processing has
   also been updated: clients proven to be legitimate via SIT are
   not subject to rate limiting.  Use "configure --enable-sit" to
   enable this feature in BIND 9.  [RT #35389]

   A new zone file format, "map", stores zone data in a format that
   can be mapped directly into memory, allowing significantly faster
   zone loading. [RT #25419]

   "delv" (domain entity lookup and validation) is a new tool with
   dig-like semantics for looking up DNS data and performing internal
   DNSSEC validation. This allows easy validation in environments
   where the resolver may not be trustworthy, and assists with
   troubleshooting of DNSSEC problems. (NOTE: The spelling of this
   utility has been changed due to a namespace conflict; see the
   Special Note, above.)  [RT #32406]

   The new "prefetch" option can improve recursive resolver
   performance: when it is in use, cache records that are still
   being requested by clients will automatically be refreshed from
   the authoritative server before they expire, reducing or eliminating
   the time window in which no answer is available in the cache.
   [RT #35041]

   Improved EDNS processing allows better resolver performance and
   reliability over slow or lossy connections. [RT #30655]

   Substantial improvements have been made in response-policy zone
   (RPZ) performance.  Up to 32 response-policy zones can now be
   configured.  Performance loss due to adding additional RPZs is
   minimal.

   RPZ now allows response policies to be configured based on the
   IP address of the client.

   ACLs can now be specified based on geographic location using the
   MaxMind GeoIP databases. Use "configure --with-geoip" to enable
   this feature in BIND 9. Thanks to Ken Brownfield for the
   contribution. [RT #30681]

   The version 3 XML schema for the statistics channel, including
   new statistics and a flattened XML tree for faster parsing, is
   no longer optional. The version 2 XML schema is now deprecated.
   [RT #30023]

   Improvements have been made to the XSL stylesheet used for XML
   statistics: The stylesheet can now be cached by the browser;
   section headers are omitted when the sections have no data to
   display; counter readability has been improved. Also, broken-out
   subgroups of XML statistics (server, zones, net, tasks, mem, and
   status) can now be requested. Thanks to Timothe Litt for the
   assistance.  [RT #35115] [RT #35117]

   The statistics channel can now provide data in JSON format as
   well as XML.

   Per-zone stats counters have been added to track TCP and UDP
   queries. [RT #35375]

   Server-wide stats counters have been added to track EDNS options
   received. [RT #35447]

   The new "in-view" zone option allows zone data to be shared
   between views, so that multiple views can serve the same zones
   authoritatively without storing multiple copies in memory. [RT #32968]

   A new compile-time option, "configure --enable-native-pkcs11",
   allows the BIND 9 cryptography functions to use the PKCS#11 API
   natively, so that BIND can drive a cryptographic hardware service
   module (HSM) directly instead of using a modified OpenSSL as an
   intermediary.  (Note: This feature requires an HSM to have a
   full implementation of the PKCS#11 API; many current HSMs only
   have partial implementations. The new "pkcs11-tokens" command
   can be used to check API completeness.  Native PKCS#11 is known
   to work with the Thales nShield HSM and with SoftHSM version 2
   from the Open DNSSEC project.)  [RT #29031]

   The new "named-rrchecker" tool can be used to check the syntax
   of individual resource records, and optionally to convert them
   to the format used for unknown record types: this allows
   provisioning systems to deploy data using new record types without
   needing to upgrade front-line name servers. [RT #34778]

   The new "dnssec-importkey" tool allows "offline" DNSSEC keys
   (i.e., keys whose private data is not stored on the system on
   which named is running) to be published or deleted on schedule
   using automatic DNSKEY management. [RT #34698]

   When re-signing a zone, the new "dnssec-signzone -Q" option drops
   signatures from keys that are still published but are no longer
   active. Thanks to Pierre Beyssac for the contribution.  [RT #34990]

   New options have been added to "dnssec-coverage": -z and -k
   indicate whether to limit coverage checks to ZSK's or KSK's, and
   -l limits coverage checking to a specified duration.  Thanks to
   Peter Palfrader for the contribution. [RT #35168]

   "named-checkconf -px" will print the contents of configuration
   files with the shared secrets obscured, making it easier to share
   configuration (e.g. when submitting a bug report) without revealing
   private information. [RT #34465]

   "named" now preserves the capitalization of names when responding
   to queries: for instance, a query for "example.com" may be
   answered with "example.COM" if the name was configured that way
   in the zone file.  Some clients have a bug causing them to depend
   on the older behavior, in which the case of the answer always
   matched the case of the query, rather than the case of the name
   configured in the DNS.  Such clients can now be specified in the
   new "no-case-compress" ACL; this will restore the older behavior
   of "named" for those clients only. [RT #35300]

   On operating systems that support routing sockets, including Mac
   OSX, *BSD and Linux, network interfaces are re-scanned automatically
   whenever they change.  Use "automatic-interface-scan no;" to
   disable this feature. [RT #23027]

   Added "rndc scan" to trigger an interface scan manually. [RT #23027]

   A new compile-time option, "configure --with-tuning=large", tunes
   various compiled-in constants and default settings to values
   suited to large servers with abundant memory. This can improve
   performance on such servers, but will consume more memory and
   may degrade performance on smaller systems. [RT #29538]

   The new "max-zone-ttl" option enforces maximum TTLs for zones.
   If loading a zone containing a higher TTL, the load fails. DDNS
   updates with higher TTLs are accepted but the TTL is truncated.
   (Note: Currently supported for master zones only; inline-signing
   slaves will be added.) [RT #38405]

   Added a new "dig +subnet" option to send an EDNS CLIENT-SUBNET
   option (as described in draft-vandergaast-edns-client-subnet-02)
   containing the specified address/prefix when querying. Thanks
   to Wilmer van der Gaast for the contribution. [RT #35415]

   Partially implemented the EDNS EXPIRE option (as described in
   draft-andrews-dnsext-expire-00).  "dig +expire" sends an EXPIRE
   option when querying.  When this option is sent with an SOA query
   to a slave zone running on a server that supports the option,
   the response will report the time until the slave zone expires.
   EXPIRE uses an experimental option code (65002), which is subject
   to change when a permanent code is assigned by IANA. [RT #35416]

   Multiple DLZ databases can now be configured, and are searched
   in order to find one that can answer an incoming query.  Individual
   zones can now be configured to be served from a specific DLZ
   database.  DLZ databases can serve zones of type "master" and
   "redirect".

   "named-checkzone" and "named-compilezone" can now read journal
   files, allowing them to process dynamic zones without the zones
   needing to be frozen first.

   The "rndc" command now supports new key algorithms in addition
   to HMAC-MD5, including HMAC-SHA1, -SHA224, -SHA256, -SHA384, and
   -SHA512.  The -A option to rndc-confgen can be used to select
   the algorithm for the generated key. (The default is still
   HMAC-MD5; this may change in a future release.) [RT #20363]

   "tsig-keygen" is now available as an alternate command name to
   use for "ddns-confgen -q"; it randomly generates a TSIG key
   suitable for use in named.conf. [RT #35503]

   Specifying the keyword "auto" instead of a salt when using "rndc
   signing -nsec3param" will cause "named" to select a 64-bit salt
   at random. [RT #35322]

   The internal and export versions of the BIND libraries (libisc,
   libdns, etc) have been unified so that external library clients
   can use the same libraries as BIND itself. [RT #33131]

   Added a "Configure" script for Windows to simplify enabling or
   disabling optional features. All versions of Visual Studio up
   to 2013 are now supported, and support has been added for 64-bit
   builds. Zip files containing pre-compiled 64-bit versions of
   BIND 9 are now included with releases. [RT #34160]

   "rndc -q" causes "rndc" to suppress output other than error
   messages. [RT #21393]

   "rndc zonestatus" reports information about a specified zone.
   [RT #21671]

   A new "rndc delzone -clean" option removes zone files when a
   zone is deleted. [RT #33570]

   "named" now listens on IPv6 as well as IPv4 interfaces by default.

Feature Changes

   Threads are now enabled by default on most operating systems,
   including Linux. Operators who were not previously using threads
   may see some changes in behavior: Linux's thread model requires
   named to drop "root" privileges earlier in the startup process;
   as a result, some files and directories may not be accessible
   to named depending on user ID and file permissions. This can be
   addressed by using the "-u" command line option for force named
   to run under the specified user ID. [RT #25483]

   The default setting for the -U option (setting the number of UDP
   listeners per interface) has been adjusted to improve performance.
   [RT #35417]

   Adaptive mutex locks are now used on systems which support them;
   this has been found to improve performance under load on many
   systems.  Use "configure --with-locktype=standard" to use
   conventional mutex locks instead. [RT #32576]

   "rndc flushtree" now flushes matching records from the address
   database and bad cache as well as the DNS cache. (Previously
   only the DNS cache was flushed.) [RT #33970]

   Updated zkt and nslint in the contrib directory to the newest
   versions: zkt 1.1.2 and nslint-3.0a2.

   The isc_bitstring API is no longer used and has been removed
   from the libisc library. [RT #35284]

   The word "never" can now be used as a synonym for "none" when
   configuring key event dates in the dnssec tools.  [RT #35277]

   Documentation of native PKCS#11 has been expanded, specifically
   to describe the new pkcs11: URI format used in key labels. [RT #35287]

   The Windows installer now places files in the Program Files area
   rather than system services. [RT #35361]

   The timestamps included in RRSIG records can now be read as
   integers indicating the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch,
   in addition to being read as formatted dates in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
   format. [RT #35185]

   Several features previously unavailable on Windows are now
   available, including "delve" and the "export library" APIs
   including libirs.  The Python tools "dnssec-coverage" and
   "dnssec-checkds" can now be enabled on Windows via "Configure",
   but are not included in the installation zips.  [RT #35441] 
   [RT #35382]  [RT #34355]

   The irs_resconf_load() function, used for reading /etc/resolv.conf,
   now returns ISC_R_FILENOTFOUND when the file is missing or
   unreadable.  However, it will still initialize an irs_resconf
   structure as if the file had been configured with nameservers
   at the IPv4 and IPv6 localhost addresses.  Existing code that
   uses irs_resconf_load() will need to be updated to treat
   ISC_R_FILENOTFOUND as a qualified success, or it may leak memory
   due to treating the result as a failure even though an irs_resconf
   structure was allocated; see CHANGES for sample C code that
   implements the correct behavior [RT #35194]

   A comment is now included in .nzf files (which are used for
   adding new zones via "rndc") to give the name of the associated
   view. [RT #34765]

   When using "request-nsid", if the name server identifier received
   from the server contains printable characters, they will be
   logged in a human-readable string format in addition to hexadecimal.
   [RT #20864]

   "named" will now log a warning when addresses of the wrong family
   are used in "listen-on" or "listen-on-v6". Previously these were
   silently ignored. [RT #17848]

   The -S and -i options to "dnssec-keygen" and "dnssec-settime"
   (to set up a successor key and set the prepublication interval)
   were inadvertently left out of "dnssec-keyfromlabel". This has
   been corrected. [RT #35394]

   When the cache is dumped via "rndc dumpdb", DNSKEY records' key
   ID's are included in the output. [RT #34533]

   The XSL stylesheet used for the XML stats channel now displays
   links to the various URLs showing broken-out subgroups of
   statistics. [RT #35605]

Bug Fixes Since 9.10.0b1

   Some name servers respond incorrectly when encountering unknown
   EDNS(0) options; this can cause problems when using SIT.  "named"
   will now check for this by resending queries without SIT when
   encountering unexpected response codes. [RT #35766]

   A signed/unsigned mismatch in dns_name_fromtext() could cause
   incorrect results when using lowercase. [RT #35743]

Thank You

   Thank you to everyone who assisted us in making this release
   possible. If you would like to contribute to ISC to assist us
   in continuing to make quality open source software, please visit
   our donations page at http://www.isc.org/donate/.

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