BIND explained

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. BIND was originally created by four graduate students with CSRG at the University of California, Berkeley and first released with 4.3BSD.Paul Vixie started maintaining it 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.

History

BIND was originally written in the early 1980s 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 competitive with Microsoft's DNS offerings; the DNSSEC features were funded by the US military who felt that DNS security was important.

Criticisms

Unlike many Internet applications, BIND requires that systems administrators fully qualify domain names in certain contexts all the way to the root, for example, 'www.web-hosting-top.com.' (note the trailing '.'). The following is an example of what can result when systems administrators forget this critical caveat:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
; www.web-hosting-top.com. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
;web-hosting-top.com. 7134 IN 80.121.204.234.

Security

Like Sendmail, WU-FTPD, and other systems dating back to the earlier laissez-faire days of the Internet, BIND 4 and BIND 8 have had a large number of serious security vulnerabilities over the years and as such their use is now strongly discouraged.P. Hudson, A. Hudson, B. Ball, H. Duff: Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed, page 723. Sams Publishing, 2005 ISBN 0-672-32792-9 BIND 9, being a rewrite, has a much better security history.