Technical data

Conﬁguring and Managing BIND

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system that maintains and distributes

information about Internet hosts. DNS consists of several databases that store

host names and host IP addresses. With DNS, there is no central storage of data

— no one server knows everything about all the Internet domains.

In UNIX environments, DNS is implemented by the Berkeley Internet Name

Domain (BIND) software. Compaq TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS implements a

BIND server based on the Internet Software Consortium’s (ISC) BIND 8.1.2.

BIND 8.1.2 provides the following features:

• DNS dynamic updates

• DNS change notiﬁcation

• New conﬁguration syntax

• Flexible, categorized logging system

• IP address-based access control for queries, zone transfers, and updates that

can be speciﬁed on a zone-by-zone basis

• More efﬁcient zone transfers

• Improved performance for servers with thousands of zones

This BIND implementation also includes round-robin scheduling. A more robust

load-balancing mechanism is provided with the load broker, which uses standard

DNS dynamic updates.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• A review of key BIND concepts (Section 5.1)

• How to migrate your existing BIND environment to BIND 8 (Section 5.2)

• How to conﬁgure BIND using the BIND conﬁguration ﬁle (Section 5.3)

• How to conﬁgure dynamic updates (Section 5.3.6)

• How to conﬁgure a DNS cluster failover and redundancy environment

(Section 5.3.7)

• How to populate the BIND server databases (Section 5.4)

• How to conﬁgure BIND using SET CONFIGURATION BIND commands

(Section 5.6)

• How to conﬁgure the BIND resolver (Section 5.7)

• How to use NSLOOKUP to query a name server (Section 5.8)

• How to troubleshoot BIND server problems (Section 5.9)

Conﬁguring and Managing BIND 5–1