BIND 9 BIND version 9 is a major rewrite of nearly all aspects of the underlying BIND architecture. This re-architecting of BIND was necessitated by the expected demands of: - Domain name system growth, particularly in very large zones such as .COM - Protocol enhancements necessary to securely query and update zones - Protocol enhancements necessary to take advantage of certain architectural features of IP version 6 These demands implied performance requirements that were not necessarily easy to attain with the BIND version 8 architecture. In particular, BIND must not only be able to run on multi-processor multi-threaded systems, but must take full advantage of the performance enhancements these architectures can provide. In addition, the underlying data storage architecture of BIND version 8 does not lend itself to implementing alternative back end databases, such as would be desirable for the support of multi-gigabyte zones. As such zones are easily foreseeable in the relatively near future, the data storage architecture needed revision. The feature requirements for BIND version 9 included: - Scalability Thread safety Multi-processor scalability Support for very large zones - Security Support for DNSSEC Support for TSIG Auditability (code and operation) Firewall support (split DNS) - Portability - Maintainability - Protocol Enhancements IXFR, DDNS, Notify, EDNS0 Improved standards conformance - Operational enhancements High availability and reliability Support for alternative back end databases - IP version 6 support IPv6 resource records (A6, DNAME, etc.) Bitstring labels APIs BIND version 9 development has been underwritten by the following organizations: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Hewlett Packard Compaq Computer Corporation IBM Process Software Corporation Silicon Graphics, Inc. Network Associates, Inc. U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency USENIX Association Stichting NLnet - NLnet Foundation BIND 9.0.0rc4 BIND 9.0.0rc4 is a release candidate for the upcoming 9.0.0 release. The only changes expected between rc4 and the final release are bug fixes and documentation updates. The 9.0.0 release, and this release candidate, is aimed at early adopters and those who wish to make use of new 9.0 features, such as IPv6 and DNSSEC secure resolution support. We are running BIND 9 in production, and it has been used as a root name server. The distribution includes a new lightweight resolver library and associated resolver daemon. These should still be considered experimental. The server-side support for DNSSEC secured zones is stable and complete with the exception of the handling of wildcard records. The support for secure resolution is still to be considered experimental. For detailed information about the state of the DNSSEC implementation, see the file doc/misc/dnssec. A small number of bugs found in rc3 have been fixed. For a detailed list of user-visible changes, see the CHANGES file. There are a few known bugs: The option "query-source * port 53;" will not work as expected. Instead of the wildcard address "*", you need to use an explicit source IP address. On some systems, IPv6 and IPv4 sockets interact in unexpected ways. For details, see doc/misc/ipv6. To reduce the impact of these problems, the server no longer listens for requests on IPv6 addresses by default. If you need to accept DNS queries over IPv6, you must specify "listen-on-v6 { any; };" in the named.conf options statement. There are known problems with thread signal handling under Solaris 2.6. The "isc_timer_reset" test sometimes fails on HP-UX 11 for unknown reasons, but the server itself seems to run fine. On FreeBSD systems, the server logs error messages like "fcntl(8, F_SETFL, 4): Inappropriate ioctl for device". This is due to a bug in the FreeBSD /dev/random device. The bug has been reported to the FreeBSD maintainers. A similar problem is reported to exist on OpenBSD. Building BIND 9 currently requires a UNIX system with an ANSI C compiler, basic POSIX support, and a good pthreads implementation. We've had successful builds and tests on the following systems: AIX 4.3 COMPAQ Tru64 UNIX 4.0D COMPAQ Tru64 UNIX 5 (with IPv6 EAK) FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE HP-UX 11 IRIX64 6.5 NetBSD-current (with unproven-pthreads-0.17) Red Hat Linux 6.0, 6.1, 6.2 Solaris 2.6, 7, 8 To build, just ./configure make Several environment variables that can be set before running configure will affect compilation: CC The C compiler to use. configure tries to figure out the right one for supported systems. CFLAGS C compiler flags. Defaults to include -g and/or -O2 as supported by the compiler. STD_CINCLUDES System header file directories. Can be used to specify where add-on thread or IPv6 support is, for example. Defaults to empty string. STD_CDEFINES Any additional preprocessor symbols you want defined. Defaults to empty string. To build shared libraries, specify "--with-libtool" on the configure command line. If your operating system has integrated support for IPv6, it will be used automatically. If you have installed KAME IPv6 separately, use "--with-kame[=PATH]" to specify its location. To see additional configure options, run "configure --help". "make install" will install "named" and the various BIND 9 libraries. By default, installation is into /usr/local, but this can be changed with the "--prefix" option when running "configure". If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source, you should also "make depend". If you're using Emacs, you might find "make tags" helpful. Building with gcc is not supported, unless gcc is the vendor's usual compiler (e.g. the various BSD systems, Linux). Parts of the library can be tested by running "make test" from the bin/tests subdirectory. Documentation The BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual is included with the source distribution in HTML and plain text format, in the doc/arm directory. A PDF version can be downloaded separately at . Some of the programs in the BIND 9 distribution have man pages under the doc/man directory. In particular, the command line options of "named" are documented in doc/man/bind/named.8. The man pages are currently not installed automatically by "make install". If you are upgrading from BIND 8, please read the migration notes in doc/misc/migration. Bug Reports and Mailing Lists Bugs reports should be sent to bind9-bugs@isc.org To join the BIND 9 Users mailing list, send mail to bind9-users-request@isc.org If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source code, you might want to join the BIND 9 Workers mailing list. Send mail to bind9-workers-request@isc.org