Nominum Calls Open Source DNS "a Recipe For Problems"

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @05:28AM from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.

Raindeer writes "Commercial DNS software provider Nominum, in an effort to promote its new cloud-based DNS service, SKYE, has slandered all open source/freeware DNS packages. It said: 'Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it's just going to get worse. ... So, whether it's Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems.' This has the DNS community fuming. Especially when you consider that Nominum was one of the companies affected by the DNS cache poisoning problem of last year, something PowerDNS, MaraDNS and DJBDNS (all open source) weren't vulnerable to."

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BIND is past it's sell-by date. by Animats · 2009-09-23 05:46 · Score: 1, Troll

BIND, like Sendmail, is one of those legacy pieces of Berkeley software from the 1980s that should have been retired a long time ago.
A basic problem with both of those packages is that they're database applications without a database. Back in the 1980s, there were no good database programs available for UNIX, and some apps had to roll their own. We're way past that.
There are open-source database-based alternatives. Qmail is a database-based replacement for Sendmail, and it's generally considered to be much more stable and secure. (At this late date, nobody should be running Sendmail.) There's MyDNS, which is a MySQL-based DNS program, but that's never really caught on. The big commercial DNS systems are all database-based.