Bind 9 Administrator Reference Manual

Chapter 6. BIND 9 Conﬁguration Reference

BIND 9 conﬁguration is broadly similar to BIND 8.x; however, there are a few new areas of

conﬁguration, such as views. BIND 8.x conﬁguration ﬁles should work with few alterations in BIND 9,

although more complex conﬁgurations should be reviewed to check if they can be more efﬁciently

implemented using the new features found in BIND 9.

BIND 4 conﬁguration ﬁles can be converted to the new format using the shell script

contrib/named-bootconf/named-bootconf.sh.

6.1. Conﬁguration File Elements

Following is a list of elements used throughout the BIND conﬁguration ﬁle documentation:

acl_name The name of an address_match_list as defined by the

acl statement.

address_match_list A list of one or more ip_addr, ip_prefix, key_id, or

acl_name elements, see Section 6.1.1.

domain_name A quoted string which will be used as a DNS name, for example

"my.test.domain".

dotted_decimal One or more integers valued 0 through 255 separated only by

dots (‘.’), such as 123, 45.67 or 89.123.45.67.

ip4_addr An IPv4 address with exactly four elements in

dotted_decimal notation.

ip6_addr An IPv6 address, such as fe80::200:f8ff:fe01:9742.

ip_addr An ip4_addr or ip6_addr.

ip_port An IP port number. number is limited to 0 through

65535, with values below 1024 typically restricted

to root-owned processes. In some cases an asterisk

(‘*’) character can be used as a placeholder to

select a random high-numbered port.

ip_prefix An IP network speciﬁed as an ip_addr, followed by a

slash (‘/’) and then the number of bits in the

netmask. Trailing zeros in a ip_addr may omitted.

For example, 127/8 is the network 127.0.0.0 with

netmask 255.0.0.0 and 1.2.3.0/28 is network

1.2.3.0 with netmask 255.255.255.240.