Question: Bind 9.x capabilities

Kevin Darcy kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Wed Apr 18 21:06:20 UTC 2001




Morris Balamut wrote:

> I was discussing the possible adoption of BIND 9.x with an associate and he
> advised
> against migrating at this time. According to him Bind 9.x has the following
> issues that
> we have specific interest in:
>
> *       does not support windows 2000

This is a vague statement. BIND 9 supports Win2K at least as much as BIND 8
does. The only thing lacking is GSS-TSIG support, not that GSS-TSIG is RFC'ed
anyway...

> *       thread model on Solaris has problems

My understanding was that this is a problem with older versions of Solaris,
not BIND _per_se_. You can, of course, always compile with threads disabled.
Again, how is this worse than BIND 8?

> *       does not support blackhole
> *       does not support statistics interval
> *       does not support sortlist
> *       does not support rrset order
> *       does not support dynamic debugging (start/stop)
> *       support for logging messages is lacking

In general, why don't you read some of the documentation that comes with BIND
9? The feature list is changing with each release; I believe BIND 9.1.1 is
close to having all of the functionality of BIND 8 that it is intended to
have, plus of course lots of extra functionality.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I'm not running
BIND 9 in production yet. But that's mainly because we're somewhat paranoid
about stability issues here, and since I'm running older versions of Solaris
on most of my DNS boxes, I can't really reap the benefits of multi-threading
anyway...

I would, however, advise anyone with a normal risk tolerance and more
up-to-date OS platforms to migrate to BIND 9. If that recommendation seems
hypocritical, then so be it.


- Kevin




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