bind8 and bind9 installed on the same server: possible?

[Eivind Olsen]

> I plan to upgrade my nameservers from bind8 to bind9.
> I guess I will encounter some compatibility problems notably in the layout
> of the zone files

Depends how freaky the zonefiles were before. You could end up having to
_not_ change a thing except for a couple of changes in your named.conf.

> - can anybody give me the point of attention for this upgrade? Your
> experience will be appreciated.

Well, I don't know if there are any oddities to your setup. At the very
least, I'd recommend you run through your named.conf with
"named-checkconf" from BIND 9. If it's an option, you could copy your
named.conf + all the zonefiles etc to another server (or VM, zone, jail
etc) and try to load it there.

If you're running a pretty much standard authoritative server, it
shouldn't be too hard to get this to work with BIND 9.

> - is it possible to install bind9 without removing bind8 in order to could
> easily and quickly swith from bind8 to bind9 and vice versa?

As was suggested by others, if you compile from source it's easy to give
each version a specific directory to live in. If you on the other hand
like to go with some vendor supplied BIND for some operating system /
distribution, I guess it depends on how it's packaged etc.

Regards
Eivind Olsen