BIND 9

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Reporting bugs and getting help
3. Contributing to BIND
4. BIND 9.17 features
5. Building BIND
6. macOS
7. Dependencies
8. Compile-time options
9. Automated testing
10. Documentation
11. Change log
12. Acknowledgments

Introduction

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 began as 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 licensed 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 versions and release notes, see https://www.isc.org/download/.

For information about supported platforms, see PLATFORMS.

Reporting bugs and getting help

To report non-security-sensitive bugs or request new features, you may open an Issue in the BIND 9 project on the ISC GitLab server at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9.

Please note that, unless you explicitly mark the newly created Issue as "confidential", it will be publicly readable. Please do not include any information in bug reports that you consider to be confidential unless the issue has been marked as such. In particular, if submitting the contents of your configuration file in a non-confidential Issue, it is advisable to obscure key secrets: this can be done automatically by using named-checkconf -px.

If the bug you are reporting is a potential security issue, such as an assertion failure or other crash in named, please do NOT use GitLab to report it. Instead, send mail to security-officer@isc.org using our OpenPGP key to secure your message. (Information about OpenPGP and links to our key can be found at https://www.isc.org/pgpkey.) Please do not discuss the bug on any public mailing list.

For a general overview of ISC security policies, read the Knowledge Base article at https://kb.isc.org/docs/aa-00861.

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.

Contributing to BIND

ISC maintains a public git repository for BIND; details can be found at http://www.isc.org/git/.

Information for BIND contributors can be found in the following files:

• General information: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Code of Conduct: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• BIND 9 code style: doc/dev/style.md
• BIND architecture and developer guide: doc/dev/dev.md

Patches for BIND may be submitted as merge requests in the ISC GitLab server at at https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/merge_requests.

By default, external contributors don't have ability to fork BIND in the GitLab server, but if you wish to contribute code to BIND, you may request permission to do so. Thereafter, you can create git branches and directly submit requests that they be reviewed and merged.

If you prefer, you may also submit code by opening a GitLab Issue and including your patch as an attachment, preferably generated by git format-patch.

BIND 9.17 features

BIND 9.17 is the newest development branch of BIND 9. It includes a number of changes from BIND 9.16 and earlier releases. New features include:

• New option "max-ixfr-ratio" to limit the size of outgoing IXFR responses before falling back to full zone transfers.
• "rndc nta -d" and "rndc secroots" now include "validate-except" entries when listing negative trust anchors.

Building BIND

Minimally, BIND requires a UNIX or Linux system with an ANSI C compiler, basic POSIX support, and a 64-bit integer type. BIND also requires the libuv asynchronous I/O library, and a cryptography provider library such as OpenSSL or a hardware service module supporting PKCS#11. On Linux, BIND requires the libcap library to set process privileges, though this requirement can be overridden by disabling capability support at compile time. See Compile-time options below for details on other libraries that may be required to support optional features.

Successful builds have been observed on many versions of Linux and UNIX, including RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SLES, openSUSE, Slackware, Alpine, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, Solaris, OpenIndiana, OmniOS CE, HP-UX, and OpenWRT.

BIND is also available for Windows Server 2012 R2 and higher. See win32utils/build.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. Significant ones are:

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.
LDFLAGS	Linker flags. Defaults to empty string.

Additional environment variables affecting the build are listed at the end of the configure help text, which can be obtained by running the command:

$ ./configure --help

macOS

Building on macOS assumes that the "Command Tools for Xcode" is installed. This can be downloaded from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ or, if you have Xcode already installed, you can run xcode-select --install. (Note that an Apple ID may be required to access the download page.)

Compile-time options

To see a full list of configuration options, run configure --help.

To build shared libraries, specify --with-libtool on the configure command line.

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 libraries: libxml2 http://xmlsoft.org or json-c https://github.com/json-c/json-c. If these are installed at a nonstandard location, then:

• for libxml2, specify the prefix using --with-libxml2=/prefix,
• for json-c, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

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 MaxMind GeoIP2 location-based ACLs, the server must be linked with libmaxminddb. This is turned on by default if the library is found; if the library is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using --with-maxminddb=/prefix. GeoIP2 support can be switched off with --disable-geoip.

For DNSTAP packet logging, you must have installed libfstrm https://github.com/farsightsec/fstrm and libprotobuf-c https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers, and BIND must be configured with --enable-dnstap.

Certain compiled-in constants and default settings can be decreased to values better suited to small machines, e.g. OpenWRT boxes, by specifying --with-tuning=small on the configure command line. This will decrease memory usage by using smaller structures, but will degrade performance.

On Linux, process capabilities are managed in user space using the libcap library, which can be installed on most Linux systems via the libcap-dev or libcap-devel package. Process capability support can also be disabled by configuring with --disable-linux-caps.

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.

The --enable-querytrace option causes named to log every step of processing every query. This should only be enabled when debugging, because it has a significant negative impact on query performance.

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. --sysconfdir defaults to $prefix/etc and --localstatedir defaults to $prefix/var.

Automated testing

A system test suite can be run with make check. 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 running the command 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 the CMocka unit testing framework. To build them, use configure --with-cmocka. Execution of tests is done by the automake parallel test driver; unit tests are also run by make check.

Documentation

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.

Change log

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.

Bug report identifiers

Most notes in the CHANGES file include a reference to a bug report or issue number. Prior to 2018, these were usually of the form [RT #NNN] and referred to entries in the "bind9-bugs" RT database, which was not open to the public. More recent entries use the form [GL #NNN] or, less often, [GL !NNN], which, respectively, refer to issues or merge requests in the GitLab database. Most of these are publicly readable, unless they include information which is confidential or security sensitive.

To look up a GitLab issue by its number, use the URL https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/issues/NNN. To look up a merge request, use https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/merge_requests/NNN.

In rare cases, an issue or merge request number may be followed with the letter "P". This indicates that the information is in the private ISC GitLab instance, which is not visible to the public.

Acknowledgments

• 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 (eay@cryptsoft.com)

• This product includes software written by Tim Hudson (tjh@cryptsoft.com)