installing bind

[Vinny Abello]

We use BIND 9.3.0 on Windows 2000 without any problems. We've also run BIND 
9.2.4 on Windows 2000. Works fine. Anything prior to 9.2.4 is not 
recommended on Windows. The TCP/IP code is lacking and buggy. Some 
hopefully helpful commends are inline:

At 03:37 AM 10/10/2004, you wrote:
>"Simon Dodd"
>
> > Jacob,
> > If you're going to also be administering the box as well as installing
> > it, the best advice you're going to get is to invest in a copy of "DNS
> > & BIND" by Albitz & Lie (O'Reilly , ISBN 0-596-00158-4). This book is
> > widely regarded as the Bible for DNS in general and BIND in
> > particular, and it covers everything you're likely to want or need to
> > know about getting BIND, installing it, configuring it and maintaining
> > it when it's running.
> >
>
>I have the book and all ARM files and everything else, as well as src and
>NIN files and so on and that doesn't make me much wiser.
>It simply proves I really know nothing about it to begin with and that is
>not really funny.

I don't think you've read enough of the DNS and BIND book. It answers all 
of your questions. Still, I'll comment below on some things.

>Here is my situation.
>
>A) I have never used BIND before, and the simplest one to install and get
>running was 4.9.6 for NT. Bind 8.x and 9.x simply wouldn't install and
>the installer provided from ISC fails all the time saying the service
>already is there and it wont uninstall to begin with.

I've never seen this behavior. It sounds like you may have to manually 
remove the service via the registry or whatever tool you're comfortable 
with using to remove services. msconfig might help if you're not familiar 
with the registry. Do you see a service called "ISC BIND" listed?

>B) No I will not install Linux on this box just to get Bind up and
>running.
>Why? Because this is a Windows box and dedicated for other stuff and I
>dont intend to re-invent the wheel and another 7 million things just to
>have Bind running as I simply need a secondary box to run NS from.

That's no problem as BIND works well on Windows as long as you have 9.2.4 
or later (in my experience).

>C) I have zero or hardly any knowledge of Linux or Unix and dont intend
>to buy 500 books on the topic, learn three new languages and stand upside
>down on my head drinking water to get rid of weird hickups just for the
>purpose of getting BIND to run.

Then don't. :) It runs fine on Windows.

>Now having said that, I am of the clear opinion that if BIND was released
>for NT then it should also be able to run and operate as such.

And it does.

>90 % of all information released about BIND is targeted towards
>Linux/Unix users, which may be fair for them but thats not what some of
>us endusers are trying to accomplish here.

90% of the information released about BIND is about BIND. There is nothing 
really OS specific about the majority of the configuration. A few things 
might just reference *nix paths with a forward slash instead of the Windows 
backslash, and syslog doesn't exist on Windows, but I can't really think of 
too many other specific differences that would stump you.

>----To get to my question....
>
>Provided I manage to get the thing to run, why in heavens name do I have
>to specify the information in several different files when the data is
>less than 500 bytes per domain which I wish to add into the bind zones?
>This seems very redundant and creates a nice little overhead of manual
>editing here. Disregarding this fact, when looking in the book for setup
>and installations, there seems to be a lot of cross referencing to this
>one file and then back to that one again.
>
>Is it to much to ask for a simple instruction set in the following
>form...
>
>     "X:\DirPath\To\The\File\FileName.Ext"
>          "Here is what should be in the file"
>          'Here is why...'
>
>Information distributed in this format would reduce the learning curve
>for almost anyone! I'm willing to bet on it.

This is all relative to your platform and where you decide to install BIND. 
The why questions are all answered in the DNS and BIND book and numerous 
other resources.

>When I look at the install of BIND 4.9.6 I have the files as follows...
>
>C:\DNS\NAMED\  << here is everything

You shouldn't be using BIND 4.9.6 at all. 4.9.11 if you absolutely must, 
but 9.2.4 or 9.3.0 would be highly recommended.

>Then it references in the book that you should change information in a
>file named named.boot

For 4.x versions, yes.

>As it turns out, named.boot is not where I installed it to be but in
>WINNT instead... ok...

Correct. On Windows it resides in %systemroot% for 4.x.

>So I look in there and find RESOLV.CONF.... hmmmm hold on a second
>there is a RESOLV.CONF in the install directory too...
>Which one is used, why and where does it say so???

resolv.conf? That's resolver configuration file typically found on *nix 
variants in /etc to configure your DNS resolver.

4.x uses named.boot
8.x/9.x uses named.conf

This is clearly stated multiple places in the DNS and BIND book.

Why are you finding a resolv.conf file when you're looking for a named.boot 
file anyway? Windows doesn't need this file, but if you have BIND specific 
tools, it can be used by them if you put it in 
%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc

>Am I alone about being confused here or is the information simply
>intentionally confusing to prevent learning?

I'm not sure what's so confusing about it. Apart from the named.boot in 4.x 
being in %SYSTEMROOT% which I'm sure is documented somewhere... When I 
first started using BIND (back with 4.x under Windows) I just had to know 
where named.boot was and where all the zone files were stored. Everything 
else was pretty straight forward and logical about the syntax.

>Could someone PLEASE make a list of the files installed and where they
>really go, and preferably make a simple example with two or three domains
>in it? That would really truly help emensly and reduce the need for us
>newbies having to sit and scratch our heads asking the same questions a
>gazillion times.

If you're using 9.2.4 or 9.3.0, all files go where you tell it to install 
BIND. The default is %systemroot%\system32\dns but I usually change that as 
not to confuse it with MSDNS. named.conf is the main configuration file and 
the zone files are whatever you want to call them. You'll probably have to 
make a named.conf file to start with. It's all pretty well documented in my 
opinion. I knew nothing about BIND 8 or 9 and went from 4 a long time ago 
without any problems following the documentation and the newer DNS and BIND 
books. They're very helpful.

Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
vinny at tellurian.com
(973)300-9211 x 125
(973)940-6125 (Direct)
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