BIND for other applications

[Barry Margolin]

In article <94s8v9$qu3 at pub3.rc.vix.com>,
Schmidt, Val <Val.Schmidt at qwest.com> wrote:
>My question is simply this:  Could BIND be used as the engine behind a
>distributed, hierarchical database that contained records other than domain
>names and IP addresses?  I'm not proposing to extend the DNS system - I'm
>proposing to use the same software to create a semi-private system with a
>different data set.

Sure.  You can define a new class of data, and add support for it to BIND.

>Further questions:
> 
>In your opinion, how well does the DNS system perform today.  For those of
>you with significant operational experience, how frequently do you think a
>user is unable to resolve a host name, and what do you think is the most
>frequent cause (server traffic?, mismanaged dns data?)

I suspect that most problems are due to server configuration errors or
registration problems.  Except in extreme environments, performance is
rarely a problem.  BIND is quite efficient as long as the server has enough
RAM to hold the entire cache; if it doesn't, though, BIND thrashes like
crazy and performance stinks.

>Finally, I am unable to find the capability in BIND to only allow queries
>into the database from specific resolvers.  While it wouldn't seem
>particularly useful in the public DNS, it would be useful in my application.
>Is there some functionality there that I'm unaware of?

Isn't this what the "allow-query" option in named.conf does?

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.