BIND: Encyclopedia - BIND

BIND

BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain, previously: Berkeley Internet Name Daemon) is the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet, especially on Unix-like systems, where it is a de facto standard. Supported by Internet Systems Consortium, it was originally created by Paul Vixie in 1988 while working for DEC.

A new version of BIND (BIND 9) was written from scratch in part to address the architectural difficulties with auditing the earlier BIND code bases, and also to support DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions). Other important features of BIND 9 include: TSIG, DNS notify, nsupdate, IPv6, rndc flush, views, multiprocessor support, and an improved portability architecture. It is commonly used on linux systems!

BIND was originally written in the early 80s under a DARPA grant. In the mid-1980s, DEC employees took over BIND development. One of these employees was Paul Vixie, who continued to work on BIND after leaving DEC. He eventually helped start the ISC, which became the entity responsible for maintaining BIND.

The development of BIND 9 was done with a combination of commercial and military contracts. Most of the features of BIND 9 were funded by UNIX vendors who wanted to ensure that BIND stayed competive with Microsoft's DNS offerings; the DNSSEC features were funded by the US military who felt that DNS security was important.

BIND - Criticisms

Like Sendmail, FTP, and other systems dating back to the more laissez-faire earlier days of the Internet, BIND 4 and BIND 8 have had a large number of serious security vulnerabilities over the years. BIND 9, being a rewrite, has a much better security history.

BIND 9 is a fairly large application that includes a large number of features that most DNS administrators probably will never use.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "BIND", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki