djbdns: An alternative to BIND

Nathan Ward nanog at daork.net
Sat Apr 9 01:46:25 UTC 2005


Vicky - "Thou shalt not post about DJB software to a mailing list Vixie 
reads regularly". I take it you didn't listen in bible study class..

I had a play with DJBDNS after using BIND for years. Here's why I 
switched back:
- No AXFR support
- No TCP support
- I was forced to use DJBs naming conventions for zones
- Licensing
- Installation

Now, it looks like some of this has changed in the past few years, but 
at the time I was unable to provide a bunch of services that I wanted 
to because of these "missing features".

One of the reasons I see people quoting for their transition from BIND 
to DJBDNS is "BIND is hard to configure".
Really.
If you've got a good understanding of DNS (which, IMO, is required to 
run DJBDNS effectively), and you're finding BIND hard to configure, 
you'd best unsubscribe now and start looking for work elsewhere.

The other one is "BIND is a bigger binary than DJBDNS".
So?
It's the 00's kids, RAM and disk are cheaper than a hooker scraping for 
a fix.

My licensing and installation points above are common to all DJB 
software. I'm a lazy bastard. I want to click a button or tap some keys 
and have stuff happen in a way I understand and trust. I don't want to 
have my hosts littered with weird arcane trash that isn't looked after 
by my packaging system. If DJB were to allow people to provide binary 
packages of his software, this point wouldn't exist.

Anyway, in closing - Run BIND9. Save yourself.

On 9/04/2005, at 12:19 PM, Chris Kuethe wrote:

>
> On Apr 8, 2005 4:55 PM, Vicky Rode <vickyr at socal.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>> http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/06/197203&from=rss
>>
>> Just wondering how many have transitioned to djbdns from bind and if 
>> so
>> any feedback.
>>
>> regards,
>> /vicky
>
> I used to use djbdns on my laptop for testing things, and then I took
> an afternoon, learned to write BIND zone files, and decided I should
> just use the BIND that comes with so many modern unixen and that
> powers so much of the internet anyway...
>
> Since then, I've always preferred deploying bind over djbdns. Even if
> it was easier to configure, the installation process for DJBDNS always
> really annoyed me. So that's a djbdns *to* bind transition story.
>
> CK
>
> -- 
> GDB has a 'break' feature; why doesn't it have 'fix' too?




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