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Open Source BIND Alternative Launches
bednarz writes "A group of experts on Tuesday released an open source alternative to the BIND DNS server. The new software — dubbed Unbound 1.0 — is a recursive DNS server. From its first prototype in 2004, Unbound was designed to be a faster, more secure replacement for BIND. Unbound supports DNS security extensions (DNSSEC), which authenticate DNS lookups but are not yet widely deployed because they rely on a public key infrastructure. Unbound was released to open source developers by NLnet Labs, VeriSign, Nominet and Kirei."
...a DNS-Server.
Taken from here: Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver. Huh, frontpage-information is always quite hard to get.
Java seems like a logical way to go with this, considering the great track record of other Java web technologies (Tomcat, Jetty, etc).
Is there anything out there?
This posting makes it sound like bind9 is not sufficiently open/free. That is not correct, and kdawson should do a better job of editing to prevent biased postings like this.
Bind9 is licensed under the ISC license, a BSD-like license. The full text of the license follows.
-molo
Copyright (C) 1996-2001 Internet Software Consortium.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND INTERNET SOFTWARE CONSORTIUM
DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL
INTERNET SOFTWARE CONSORTIUM BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING
FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Anything with Verisign's named attached to it?
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
djbdns is now in the public domain (as of December 2007). Before that, there was no license.
http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
We use powerdns_recursor which seems very similar, and is very good.
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Slashdot Barbie says "research is hard".
It's also very small, extremely fast, highly modular, and extraordinarily robust. It could take the load of a root name server, if you had the bandwidth. It actually approaches the almost-mythical status of "bug-free software"; I certainly would be surprised by any remaining security or stability issues being discovered in it.
The man himself can often come across as arrogant - but you can't deny with djbdns he's written extraordinarily stable, virtually bug-free code that he has now (along with almost all of his other work) explicitly gifted to the public domain. He deserves a little credit for that, imho, and djbdns certainly deserves being considered alongside any other DNS server.
If you run BIND with 100K zones, it takes quite some time to come up and starts answering queries. If you do a reload, it has a dead time in between. Try it...As secondary it has bugs (for more than 12 months now) that may crash it. I just had customer who paid a lot of money to get it fixed by an external company. Of course the fix was sent to the BIND maintainers.
As always, you can work around the problem. E.g. for the startup/reload problem you can use multiple server and load balancers, switch ip addresses, pull a rabbit out of your hat... It's all possible. The question is always: is it cost efficent? If you have to adopt your procedures to work with BIND, you may do so. A lot of companys prefer paying money and adopt the software to their procdures. Both ways may work.
BIND doesn't have a performance problem as primary nameserver or secondary nameserver. It has a performance problem as a caching nameserver and a severe one. This is why i'm happy about Unbound.
At last: Some root nameservers should always run BIND. We need at huge diversity of software for root server, even if it creates pains. Just for security reasons....
Regards, Martin
Disclaimer: I don't hate BIND, i don't love specific comercial products. The decision is always based on a lot of parameters. Price, FOSS vs. comercial, hardware or software based solution, Know How of the administrators... All goes into one pot. There is no one size fits all.