- Introduction
- Reporting bugs and getting help
- Contributing to BIND
- BIND 9.12 features
- Building BIND
- Compile-time options
- Automated testing
- Documentation
- Change log
- Acknowledgments
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is a complete, highly portable implementation of the DNS (Domain Name System) protocol.
The BIND name server, named
, is able to serve as an authoritative name
server, recursive resolver, DNS forwarder, or all three simultaneously. It
implements views for split-horizon DNS, automatic DNSSEC zone signing and
key management, catalog zones to facilitate provisioning of zone data
throughout a name server constellation, response policy zones (RPZ) to
protect clients from malicious data, response rate limiting (RRL) and
recursive query limits to reduce distributed denial of service attacks,
and many other advanced DNS features. BIND also includes a suite of
administrative tools, including the dig
and delv
DNS lookup tools,
nsupdate
for dynamic DNS zone updates, rndc
for remote name server
administration, and more.
BIND 9 is a complete re-write of the BIND architecture that was used in versions 4 and 8. Internet Systems Consortium (https://www.isc.org), a 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation dedicated to providing software and services in support of the Internet infrastructure, developed BIND 9 and is responsible for its ongoing maintenance and improvement. BIND is open source software licenced under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0.
For a summary of features introduced in past major releases of BIND, see the file HISTORY.
For a detailed list of changes made throughout the history of BIND 9, see the file CHANGES. See below for details on the CHANGES file format.
For up-to-date release notes and errata, see http://www.isc.org/software/bind9/releasenotes
Please report assertion failure errors and suspected security issues to [email protected].
General bug reports can be sent to [email protected].
Feature requests can be sent to [email protected].
Please note that, while ISC's ticketing system is not currently publicly
readable, this may change in the future. Please do not include information
in bug reports that you consider to be confidential. For example, when
sending the contents of your configuration file, it is advisable to obscure
key secrets; this can be done automatically by using named-checkconf -px
.
Professional support and training for BIND are available from ISC at https://www.isc.org/support.
To join the BIND Users mailing list, or view the archives, visit https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-users.
If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source code, you may also want to join the BIND Workers mailing list, at https://lists.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/bind-workers.
A public git repository for BIND is maintained at http://www.isc.org/git/, and also on Github at https://github.com/isc-projects.
Information for BIND contributors can be found in the following files:
- General information: doc/dev/contrib.md
- BIND 9 code style: doc/dev/style.md
- BIND architecture and developer guide: doc/dev/dev.md
Patches for BIND may be submitted either as Github pull requests
or via email. When submitting a patch via email, please prepend the
subject header with "[PATCH]
" so it will be easier for us to find.
If your patch introduces a new feature in BIND, please submit it to
[email protected]; if it fixes a bug,
please submit it to [email protected].
BIND 9.12.0 is the newest development branch of BIND 9. It includes a number of changes from BIND 9.11 and earlier releases. New features include:
dnstap-read -x
prints a hex dump of the wire format of each logged DNS message.- The query handling code has been substantially refactored for improved readability, maintainability and testability .
dnstap
output files can now be configured to roll automatically when reaching a given size.- Log file timestamps can now also be formatted in ISO 8601 (local) or ISO 8601 (UTC) formats.
- Logging channels and
dnstap
output files can now be configured to use a timestamp as the suffix when rolling to a new file. named-checkconf -l
lists zones found innamed.conf
.- Added support for the EDNS Padding and Keepalive options.
BIND requires a UNIX or Linux system with an ANSI C compiler, basic POSIX support, and a 64-bit integer type. Successful builds have been observed on many versions of Linux and UNIX, including RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, SCO OpenServer, and OpenWRT.
BIND is also available for Windows XP, 2003, 2008, and higher. See
win32utils/readme1st.txt
for details on building for Windows systems.
To build on a UNIX or Linux system, use:
$ ./configure
$ make
If you're planning on making changes to the BIND 9 source, you should run
make depend
. If you're using Emacs, you might find make tags
helpful.
Several environment variables that can be set before running configure
will
affect compilation:
Variable | Description |
---|---|
CC |
The C compiler to use. configure tries to figure out the right one for supported systems. |
CFLAGS |
C compiler flags. Defaults to include -g and/or -O2 as supported by the compiler. Please include '-g' if you need to set CFLAGS . |
STD_CINCLUDES |
System header file directories. Can be used to specify where add-on thread or IPv6 support is, for example. Defaults to empty string. |
STD_CDEFINES |
Any additional preprocessor symbols you want defined. Defaults to empty string. For a list of possible settings, see the file OPTIONS. |
LDFLAGS |
Linker flags. Defaults to empty string. |
BUILD_CC |
Needed when cross-compiling: the native C compiler to use when building for the target system. |
BUILD_CFLAGS |
Optional, used for cross-compiling |
BUILD_CPPFLAGS |
|
BUILD_LDFLAGS |
|
BUILD_LIBS |
To see a full list of configuration options, run configure --help
.
On most platforms, BIND 9 is built with multithreading support, allowing it
to take advantage of multiple CPUs. You can configure this by specifying
--enable-threads
or --disable-threads
on the configure
command line.
The default is to enable threads, except on some older operating systems on
which threads are known to have had problems in the past. (Note: Prior to
BIND 9.10, the default was to disable threads on Linux systems; this has
now been reversed. On Linux systems, the threaded build is known to change
BIND's behavior with respect to file permissions; it may be necessary to
specify a user with the -u option when running named
.)
To build shared libraries, specify --with-libtool
on the configure
command line.
Certain compiled-in constants and default settings can be increased to
values better suited to large servers with abundant memory resources (e.g,
64-bit servers with 12G or more of memory) by specifying
--with-tuning=large
on the configure
command line. This can improve
performance on big servers, but will consume more memory and may degrade
performance on smaller systems.
For the server to support DNSSEC, you need to build it with crypto support. To use OpenSSL, you should have OpenSSL 1.0.2e or newer installed. If the OpenSSL library is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using "--with-openssl=/prefix" on the configure command line. To use a PKCS#11 hardware service module for cryptographic operations, specify the path to the PKCS#11 provider library using "--with-pkcs11=/prefix", and configure BIND with "--enable-native-pkcs11".
To support the HTTP statistics channel, the server must be linked with at
least one of the following: libxml2
http://xmlsoft.org or json-c
https://github.com/json-c. If these are
installed at a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using
--with-libxml2=/prefix
or --with-libjson=/prefix
.
To support compression on the HTTP statistics channel, the server must be
linked against libzlib. If this is installed in a nonstandard location,
specify the prefix using --with-zlib=/prefix
.
To support storing configuration data for runtime-added zones in an LMDB database, the server must be linked with liblmdb. If this is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using "with-lmdb=/prefix".
To support GeoIP location-based ACLs, the server must be linked with libGeoIP. This is not turned on by default; BIND must be configured with "--with-geoip". If the library is installed in a nonstandard location, use specify the prefix using "--with-geoip=/prefix".
For DNSTAP packet logging, you must have libfstrm https://github.com/farsightsec/fstrm and libprotobuf-c https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers, and BIND must be configured with "--enable-dnstap".
Python requires the 'argparse' and 'ply' modules to be available. 'argparse' is a standard module as of Python 2.7 and Python 3.2. 'ply' is available from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ply.
On some platforms it is necessary to explicitly request large file support
to handle files bigger than 2GB. This can be done by using
--enable-largefile
on the configure
command line.
Support for the "fixed" rrset-order option can be enabled or disabled by
specifying --enable-fixed-rrset
or --disable-fixed-rrset
on the
configure command line. By default, fixed rrset-order is disabled to
reduce memory footprint.
If your operating system has integrated support for IPv6, it will be used
automatically. If you have installed KAME IPv6 separately, use
--with-kame[=PATH]
to specify its location.
make install
will install named
and the various BIND 9 libraries. By
default, installation is into /usr/local, but this can be changed with the
--prefix
option when running configure
.
You may specify the option --sysconfdir
to set the directory where
configuration files like named.conf
go by default, and --localstatedir
to set the default parent directory of run/named.pid
. For backwards
compatibility with BIND 8, --sysconfdir
defaults to /etc
and
--localstatedir
defaults to /var
if no --prefix
option is given. If
there is a --prefix
option, sysconfdir defaults to $prefix/etc
and
localstatedir defaults to $prefix/var
.
A system test suite can be run with make test
. The system tests require
you to configure a set of virtual IP addresses on your system (this allows
multiple servers to run locally and communicate with one another). These
IP addresses can be configured by by running the script
bin/tests/system/ifconfig.sh up
as root.
Some tests require Perl and the Net::DNS and/or IO::Socket::INET6 modules, and will be skipped if these are not available. Some tests require Python and the 'dnspython' module and will be skipped if these are not available. See bin/tests/system/README for further details.
Unit tests are implemented using Automated Testing Framework (ATF).
To run them, use configure --with-atf
, then run make test
or
make unit
.
The BIND 9 Administrator Reference Manual is included with the source
distribution, in DocBook XML, HTML and PDF format, in the doc/arm
directory.
Some of the programs in the BIND 9 distribution have man pages in their
directories. In particular, the command line options of named
are
documented in bin/named/named.8
.
Frequently (and not-so-frequently) asked questions and their answers can be found in the ISC Knowledge Base at https://kb.isc.org.
Additional information on various subjects can be found in other
README
files throughout the source tree.
A detailed list of all changes that have been made throughout the development BIND 9 is included in the file CHANGES, with the most recent changes listed first. Change notes include tags indicating the category of the change that was made; these categories are:
Category | Description |
---|---|
[func] | New feature |
[bug] | General bug fix |
[security] | Fix for a significant security flaw |
[experimental] | Used for new features when the syntax or other aspects of the design are still in flux and may change |
[port] | Portability enhancement |
[maint] | Updates to built-in data such as root server addresses and keys |
[tuning] | Changes to built-in configuration defaults and constants to improve performance |
[performance] | Other changes to improve server performance |
[protocol] | Updates to the DNS protocol such as new RR types |
[test] | Changes to the automatic tests, not affecting server functionality |
[cleanup] | Minor corrections and refactoring |
[doc] | Documentation |
[contrib] | Changes to the contributed tools and libraries in the 'contrib' subdirectory |
[placeholder] | Used in the master development branch to reserve change numbers for use in other branches, e.g. when fixing a bug that only exists in older releases |
In general, [func] and [experimental] tags will only appear in new-feature releases (i.e., those with version numbers ending in zero). Some new functionality may be backported to older releases on a case-by-case basis. All other change types may be applied to all currently-supported releases.
-
The original development of BIND 9 was underwritten by the following organizations:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. Hewlett Packard Compaq Computer Corporation IBM Process Software Corporation Silicon Graphics, Inc. Network Associates, Inc. U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency USENIX Association Stichting NLnet - NLnet Foundation Nominum, Inc.
-
This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. http://www.OpenSSL.org/
-
This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young ([email protected])
-
This product includes software written by Tim Hudson ([email protected])