djbdns: An alternative to BIND

Mon Apr 11 13:58:07 UTC 2005

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005, Dean Anderson wrote:

> But what pushed me was that BIND9 is not compliant with AXFR standards.
>
> There is more to the story than can be explained shortly. However, Vixie
> and crew tried to ramrod a change to AXFR a while ago to make BIND9
> compliant. And asking _every_ other implemenation to change in the
> process.  That effort failed. So far as I know, ISC has not made any
> effort to either tell people that BIND9 isn't compliant, nor alter BIND9
> to be compliant. At present, BIND9 attempts to detect whether it is
> transferring from another BIND9 server to determine with to use the
> standard protocol or to use the non-standard BIND9 protocol.

Surely, you aren't saying that is somethig wrong with that or that they
are making non-compliant product just because they choose to use different
"proprietary" protocol when two of their products interact with each other
(while still supporting standard protocols for other systems)? Otherwise 
if we do use your rationale tha product is bad when it does it, then all 
my cisco equipment would be considered bad!

> Its not a real big problem, though the BIND9 detection might be dicey. 
> An implmentation that pretends to be BIND (but not using the proprietary
> protocol) might have a problem. But so far as I know, there are no such
> implemenations at present, so its not a big problem, at least, not right
> now, anyway. It could be a problem later, if someone introduces a server
> that pretends to be BIND9, but isn't.

Nobody should be producing product that "pretends" to be something else,
that itself would be a problem and may even be illegal if BIND name is
trademarked (and even if its not if somebody makes different product
that is using bind name and that product does not work or works differently,
it creates dillusion and bad reputation for makers of bind and so its
something ISC could legally demand to be stopped).

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net