InetDaemon.Com

The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) is the de facto standard for DNS servers. Development of BIND is funded and supported by Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, the US DISA and USENIX, all of whom contribute funding or code (or both) to support DNS.

BIND stands for Berkeley Internet Name Daemon and was developed at the University of California at Berkeley. BIND is a software server application that provides name resolution services and runs on nearly all platforms (yes, including WIndows!). Included with BIND are several standard tools such as dig, nslookp and namedxfr. BIND is the software used by most Unix, BSD and Linux based systems to provide name resolution. BIND is written and maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) who also maintain the root DNS server F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. In fact, ALL of the DNS root servers run BIND!

Make your life a whole lot easier. Just run BIND on all your DNS servers that communicate with the Internet even if you are on Windows. BIND is everywhere. DO NOT try to get your Windows DNS servers to communicate directly with BIND unless you brain-damage BIND first.

You can get a copy of BIND for FREE from the Internet Software Consortium.

BIND QUICK INFO

• The name of the BIND binary is named
• BIND configuration file is named.conf which is usually in
  • Solaris: /var/named
  • FreeBSD: /etc/namedb
• Zone files are stored separately in /var/named/standard
• Common configuration blocks for named.conf are as follows
  • ROOT HINTS
    zone "." {
    type hint;
    file "named.root";
    };
  • MASTER SERVER
    zone "mydomain.com" {
    type master;
    file "mydomain.com.db";
    };
  • SLAVE SERVER
    zone "mydomain.com" {
    type slave;
    file "s/mydomain.com.bak";
    masters {
    <master.server.ip.address>;
    };
    };
  • NON-RECURSIVE SERVICE
    (no lookups of external domains; use on your master DNS servers in your DMZ if you own a domain)
    Launch named with the -r flag
  • START BIND
    # named /path/to/named.conf
  • RESTART BIND; read named.conf and check serial #'s
    kill -TERM <BIND PID>
    

Remember that DNS relies on both UDP and IP as well as the network hardware . DNS will not function unless your IP networking configuration is correct. If you are building a recursive server used for resolving external domains (the default), your server will need access to the DNS Root servers.